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A review into the school’s watchdog’s response to the death of headteacher Ruth Perry will begin this month, led by a former Ofsted chief inspector.

Dame Christine Gilbert will lead the independent learning review, which was announced in January, in response to the Coroner’s Prevention of Future Deaths report from Perry’s inquest.

The headteacher died by suicide after an Ofsted report downgraded her Caversham Primary School in Reading from the highest grade Outstanding to its lowest, Inadequate over safeguarding concerns.

In December, a coroner concluded the Ofsted inspection in November 2022 “likely contributed” to Perry’s death.

On Monday, announcing Dame Christine’s appointment, Ofsted said the review would not examine the inspection of Caversham Primary School or the judgments made.

Dame Christine, who was a teacher for 18 years, served as chief inspector at Ofsted from 2006 until 2011.

School leaders’ union the NAHT said the review must be independent and impartial, noting a concern some might have that it is being led by a former Ofsted chief.

Dame Christine said she will take a “detailed and thorough” look at events from the end of the school inspection to the conclusion of the inquest, and will speak with Perry’s family.

She said:

The death of Ruth Perry was a deeply sad and shocking event. Ofsted has accepted that it is vitally important for it to learn from this tragedy and has asked me to help them do that.

I intend to take a very detailed and thorough look at all areas of Ofsted’s work – from the moment the Caversham inspection ended, through to the conclusion of the Coroner’s inquest.

I will scrutinise the approach taken and advise on future actions and revisions needed to improve Ofsted’s policies and processes for dealing with any tragic incident.

Importantly, I will hear first-hand from the family of Ruth Perry to gain a better understanding of the impact of Ofsted’s work. I would like to thank them in advance for agreeing to engage with my review.

Current chief inspector of Ofsted, Sir Martyn Oliver, said: “I am very grateful to Dame Christine for agreeing to lend her valuable experience and expertise to leading this important review.”

Reform UK leader Richard Tice has told candidates it is “not sensible” to use social media after drinking alcohol, and said they should avoid posting “inappropriate” comments after complaints were made about several posts.

The party has ditched seven candidates for the upcoming election following complaints about their social media posts. He warned that in the future, the party would “part company” with candidates making similar posts.

Tice said every party has their share of “morons” but added that he is committed to kicking them out quickly.

At a press conference in London, he said:

We’re very clear to all our candidates, for heaven’s sake if you’re going to have a glass on a Friday night then don’t use social media.

It’s not sensible, if someone lets us down hereafter, then frankly if it is inappropriate, if it is unacceptable, then we’re going to part company.

So you can have your freedom of speech, your freedom of expression, that doesn’t mean you have the right to represent Reform UK as a parliamentary candidate, because that’s our choice.

Campaign group Hope Not Hate found tweets by candidates Jonathan Kay and Mick Greenhough in which they made derogatory comments about Muslims and black people.

Kay, who was standing for election in South Ribble, tweeted in 2019 that Muslims “never coexist with others” and should be deported, and claimed Africans had IQs “among the lowest in the world”.

Greenhough, who was the Reform candidate in Orpington, tweeted in 2023 that “the only solution” was to “remove the Muslims from our territory” and in 2019 said Ashkenazi Jews were a “problem” and had “caused the world massive misery”.

Both men were removed as Reform candidates, after the publication of Hope Not Hate’s findings last week.

Labour leader Sir Keir Starmer has said the Conservatives are “chasing a smear” in raising questions about deputy leader Angela Rayner’s taxes.

We reported earlier that he said “nobody is interested” in questions about the living and tax arrangements of his deputy Angela Rayner from a decade ago, and criticised Conservatives for focusing on that rather than improving the state of healthcare.

Rayner has faced questions about whether she paid the right amount of tax on the 2015 sale of her ex-council house due to confusion over whether it was her principal residency.

Sir Keir defended Rayner and said people were more interested in “problems caused by this government.”

He said:

Angela Rayner has been asked no end of questions about this. She’s answered them all. She said she’s very happy to answer any further questions from the police or from any of the authorities.

I don’t need to see the legal advice. My team has seen it. But I will say this, that on the day that the A&E figures, people are waiting more than 24 hours in A&E, we now know that they are 10 times as high as they were five years ago.

The idea that the Tories want to be focusing on what Angela Rayner, how much time she spent with her ex-husband 10 years ago, I can tell you here at this hospital, nobody but nobody is interested in that. They’re very, very interested in what are you going to do about the A&E problem caused by this government.

Sir Keir added that it was “not appropriate” for him to see Rayner’s legal advice personally.

But I do know this, that if you’re waiting more than 24 hours for A&E, you’re much more interested in why the government is not absolutely laser focused on that, which is what they should be, than chasing this smear against Angela Rayner and how much time she spent with her husband over 10 years ago.

Starmer: ‘nobody is interested’ in Angela Rayner’s tax affairs

Keir Starmer has been making a campaign visit to Kings Mill hospital in Sutton-in-Ashfield in the east Midlands, to back up Labour’s announcement that it intends to digitise the NHS “red book” that parents use for their children’s medical records.

Previous health secretaries Jeremy Hunt and Matt Hancock had both hoped to implement a digitisation policy, but it was yet to happen, a fact pointed out by shadow mental health minister Abena Oppong-Asare on Sky News during the morning media round, when she said:

This is something that the government had previously announced that they would implement in 2017. And there is money already put aside for NHS digital moving forward, but that hasn’t been implemented.

We do need to move with the times. The equipment that’s being used is massively out of date, a quarter of a century out of date, and conversations that I’ve had with healthcare professionals, they feel massively frustrated that they don’t have the relevant technology.

Oppong-Asare said she believed that digitising the records and incorporating them into the NHS app might help with the low uptake of some childhood vaccines in the UK, specifically mentioning measles.

David Lammy LBC programme to be investigated by Ofcom

Mel Stride, the government Work and Pension secretary, was also talking about mental health and young people’s mental health on the media round earlier, although with a slightly different tack. He was saying the government was aiming to get more people who had been experiencing mental health issues back to work.

He told listeners to the BBC’s Today programme:

We need to be having a grown up and sensible conversation about where we’re going with mental health. It is very good news that we are more open about discussing mental health, far too many people suffered in silence in the past.

However, I think we also need to look very carefully about whether we are beginning to label or medicalise conditions that in the past would have been seen as the ups and downs of life. We all go through difficult times in our life. That is regrettable, but it is part and a natural part of the human condition.

None of that is to suggest that there aren’t additional pressures that have contributed to mental health problems … Covid and lockdown and so on, and I would add to that, incidentally, particularly for young people, social media and the impact of that. But we do need to have this grown up discussion.

Stride went on to say:

At the heart of the approach that I’m taking is perhaps it’s an old fashioned belief – but I think it’s one that needs to come back into fashion – is that work is good for you.

Work is good for your mental health. Getting up in the morning, having a sense of purpose, interacting with other people in the workplace, having a conversation at the water-cooler, or whatever it may be, is good for our mental health.

And there’s plenty of evidence that shows that, so my mission is to get as many people into work as possible. And I care the most about those who can benefit from work in the way that I’ve described. And that’s why I’m reviewing the process by which people go onto these long term benefits.

There is quite a healthcare theme developing today, and Wes Streeting has also been commenting this morning on a pledge made by London Mayor Sadiq Khan that if he is reelected in May, he would pledge £800,000 to “plug gaps” in mental health support for the most deprived schools in the capital.

Streeting said he was “delighted to see children and young people’s mental health high on Sadiq’s agenda. Really excited by these plans – and a Labour government working with our Labour Mayor will be able to go even further.”

Khan made the pledge late last night in the Mirror, saying it would “plug some of the gaps left by cuts and provide young people, their schools, and youth workers with the proper support they need”.

He said “Children and young people’s mental health is a public health emergency. It’s shocking that so many of our young Londoners are facing mental health difficulties. This is a crisis of the Tories’ making.”

In the Reform UK briefing, Richard Tice was dismissive of those comments by Labour’s Wes Streeting, saying “he must have heard what our conference was about because he wrote a few lines in a daily newspaper this morning.”

Tice compared Labour’s oft-cited pledge to spend £28bn on what he described as “their ridiculous green agenda that would have achieved nothing” to the £1bn figure he said they had pledged to use private healthcare capacity, saying Labour were showing “weak ambition”.

He said Streeting had claimed it would take a decade to sort out healthcare, but Reform UK were aiming for a zero patient waiting list within two years.

Tice claims that three main prongs of their policy would drive up capacity in the healthcare sector in the UK, proposing to vastly increase tax relief on private healthcare to drive uptake, use money to procure spare private healthcare capacity for the NHS, and that to attract and retain frontline healthcare staff they will pay zero basic rate income tax for three years.

He also claimed that Labour had a secret plan “to put VAT on all independent healthcare”, and said that instead of giving more money to “bungling NHS bureaucrats” he wanted to bring in logistics people from the likes of FedEx, Amazon and the military to sort out what he said was “the lack of productivity” in the NHS.

One part of the Reform UK briefing was directly addressed at Labour’s shadow health spokesperson Wes Streeting, who was also on the media round this morning.

Here is a flavour of what Streeting was setting out earlier as Labour’s plans for health. Describing it as a “pragmatic” argument, he told GB News:

It seems mad to me that we’ve got spare capacity in the private sector and we’re not using it.

You’ve got a situation today where middle and upper class people who can pay to go private are being seen faster, getting diagnosed more quickly and treated more quickly, which is certainly better for their quality of life but better for their outcomes.

And then working class people are left behind because they’re priced out of this two-tier system.

What I’m proposing is the Labour government would use spare capacity in the private sector to bring down waiting lists faster, but no one will have to worry about the bill.

I’m not happy about this because I think the NHS should have the staff, the equipment, the technology it needs without relying on the private sector, but I’ve got to deal with the world as it is after 14 years of Conservative government, not the world as I would wish it to be.

Of course, in the longer term Labour’s ambition is through workforce expansion, doubling the number of scanners and building on our proud record as a party of making sure that in future the NHS has the staff, the equipment and the technology it needs to treat patients, and to honour that founding principle of the NHS as a public service free at the point of use there for us when we need it.

On the Today programme, asked about the future of social care, Streeting said he would not be bounced into announcing something from the next Labour manifesto, but told listeners:

I would hope that the next Labour government won’t just provide an answer to the immediate crisis in social care but will set out a long-term direction for investment and reform that can command consensus across the divide and can last for generations, as we did on the NHS in 1948.

I’ll come back with some key points from the Reform UK briefing in a moment – essentially as expected Richard Tice has said the party would scrap net zero targets and use the money to fund a huge expansion of private healthcare provision – but my main takeaway was tonally it was pitched as if the party were the main opposition to an expected Labour government, and there was very little in there addressing the current administration.

Labour leader in Scotland, Anas Sarwar, has written for the Daily Record today repeating his attack on what he has called “the SNP’s financial mismanagement”.

He writes:

It is not those with “the broadest shoulders” bearing the brunt of the SNP’s tax rises, as Humza Yousaf promised – it is ordinary working people, many of whom are struggling with high bills, soaring rents, and rising food prices.

Nurses, teachers, and council workers are all seeing their tax bills rise while they watch their services decline.

Sarwar has been criticising the SNP tax policy for raising taxes for those earning £29,000 and above, although some analysis has shown tha UK-wide national insurance changes will cancel out much of the rise for higher earners.

Richard Tice has opened up this Reform UK briefing by talking about “the woke managerial middle class who happen to be eco-zealots” and has introduced Lee Anderson who is reminiscing about coal-mining and is talking specifically about the mineworkers’ pension scheme.