15/03/2016 The Papers

of their first match tomorrow against the West Indies. That is in

the next 15 minutes, after the papers.

Hello and welcome to our look ahead to what the the papers will be

With me are Head of News for The Times Fay Schlesinger

and energy correspondent for the FT Kiran Stacey.

Let's start with the New Day. Fay, the great British schools shake-up.

An interesting choice of picture on the front page. I have no idea what

it is. I think it is a sponge and a classroom window. The shake-up is

about a bit more than sponges. They are all going to become academies?

One of the key announcements from tomorrow's Budget will be that by

2022, every school in England will be an academy. That means they go

from being under the control of the local authority to getting their

funding direct from the Department for Education. It is a big change.

We have had local authority is running our schools since 1902, sat

over 100 years. The theory is that you can have more power for the

people. It will put the power back in the hands of those that want to

run the academy chintz. If a school refuses to turn into an academy,

there will be taken over by the government, so this is a real push

to get standards up. We are almost inexplicably behind on maths

especially compared to places like Shanghai. And we cannot work out

why, so this is a push to give more power to these schools to do better.

They will also allow schools to open for an hour longer and give them

funding to do so. Kiran, the jury is out as to whether turning a school

into an academy mix the standards better. Sir Michael Wilshaw, the

chief inspector of schools, only last week said that in three or four

cases, it has not worked. It is always going to vary, because it is

giving more power to the people who run these schools. So some will get

better and some will get worse. One theory is that a lot of them have

got better so far because it gives schools a bit of extra cash and a

boost in confidence. And parents decide, I want to send my kids there

instead of the comprehensive down the road. So it sucks pupils away

from those comprehensives. If every school is an academy, we will see

whether the theory works across all schools. If so, great. But if what

has been happening is that good pupils are sucked out of other

schools, we will see this model fail. Fay, no national collective

bargaining as far as teachers' salaries are concerned. And no

national curriculum. It is a freefall. It is a real mark of this

government that they are trying to put power back in the hands of

people. We have seen it with clinical commissioning groups within

the health service as well. They are trying to move away from having the

local council in control and putting it back into the hands of those at

the coal face. It is a bit of an experiment. It is great, as long as

it is then carefully controlled. When we start seeing standards

falling, you have to wrestle control back. There is a big question about

what happens to failing academies. We are not sure what will happen to

schools that do not succeed when they turn into academies. Maybe the

government has to step in. It could be a big centralisation programme.

It could end up not being power to the schools, it could be the central

government taking back control. Now to the Financial Times. Kiran,

Osborne to break promise of fiscal claustrophobic? It is a good

headline. George Osborne is going to have his hands tied tomorrow. There

is a spending gap in his Budget of ?18 billion because although the

economy is growing, wages are not. That means the tax receipts are not

flowing through to the Treasury in the way George Osborne thought they

would. So instead of being able to have a big giveaway as we get

further through this Parliament, he is going to have to make further

cuts of about 4 billion by the end of this Parliament. That means when

it comes to Budget Day is like tomorrow, he will not be able to do

what he loves to do, which is pull a rabbit out of the hat at the end.

Don't speak too soon! Well, he might pull a rabbit out of the hat, but it

will not be an expensive one because he doesn't have the money to play

with. So we think he's going to miss one of his big fiscal targets, and

that is cutting debt as a share of GDP. He promised he would cut it

every year. That will not happen, because the tax revenues are not

flowing through. Fay, how does the Conservative government continue to

sell the austerity line before the targets are being missed? This is an

argument that junior doctors make. If you are trying to scale back, why

are you not hitting your targets? For Osborne, it plays into his hands

to have an element of economic instability, both in the run-up to

the next elections, and also in the run-up to the EU referendum. He

wants us to stay in the EU. Any sense of not being on course

economically would play into the hands of those who want to stay with

the EU, because we don't know what happens with Brexit. This is the

political calculation Osborne has made throughout. He has missed

target after target, but each time he has said the alternative is

worse, so stick with me. That has become even bigger for him now that

Jeremy Corbyn is in charge of the Labour Party. The Independent,

Russia set to ditch Assad. He has pulled his forces out of Syria. This

piece is arguing that the West hopes that is the case. We had the

extraordinary announcement yesterday that Putin would pull out a loss of

his forces. There is a whole set of things at play. He might be wanting

to concentrate on Ukraine and has too much on his plate. He has

massive financial problems with the state of oil at the moment. He might

feel, I made Assad stronger and now I can get out and still keep him as

an ally. Or he might be saying here is a weak leader and we will get rid

of him. There is no one to replace Assad, frankly. But if he does bail

out on him, we could have to delete different landscape. We are running

out of time. Kiran, there is a reason you are sitting to Fay's

left! A little item on the front of the Daily Telegraph. BBC battle for

prime spot on the sofa. That is because Louise Minchin and the

replacement for Bill Turnbull, Dan Walker, are sitting on the sofa and

having a Barney as to who sits on the left are going to the viewer and

who sits camera right, viewer right. Kiran? This is a revelation to me.

Apparently, the camera left seat signals seniority in TV circles.

This is something we newspaper hacks had no idea about. We have our own

equivalent. If you open a newspaper, the right-hand page is more

important because people look at it first. I guess that is the argument,

that because you read from left to right, when you look at a screen,

you look from left to right. This is a key argument about sexism at the

BBC. I think you will find that watching television news with

co-presenters works on every challenge Click channel. You will be

back in an hour to look at more of the stories behind the news. Now,

Sportsday. Hello, I'm Olly Foster,

these are our headlines this