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Teaching bans: Gathering the numbers

Months ago, I sent a Freedom of Information request to the Department for Education asking for details of all teachers banned in the past five…
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The once homeless father who got a new home

It’s easy to take things for granted. I met a father-of-two a few weeks back whose relationship break up had left him homeless. Lee Mobley,…
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Meeting the Historical Re-enactors

It turns out the world of historical re-enactment is far from a monolith of collectively-interested hobbyists. Re-enactment has its own sub-cultures, sea-shelves and side-streets. For…
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Places: Porto

Fresh back from Porto, Portugal. The city, full of heave and attitude, where the stunning and decrepit sit side by side, is a compact pumping…
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Crunching Data: The School Holiday Fines

A couple of weeks ago my piece of work on school holiday and truancy penalties was broadcast across telly, the wireless and t’internet. The online…
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They have a dream: Harwich friends buy an overgrown, graffiti-strewn derelict Tudor fort

If only every assignment went like this: Hey Laurence, could you do a picture feature on an abandoned fort out on the Essex coast? Alas,…
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Dead Ends: Life and work in the shadows of unsolved murders

Loose ends make a fertile breeding ground for rumour, suspicion and fear. And few loose ends linger in quite the same way as an unsolved…
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Gosh, a woman with a comic shop

We were trying something a little new on the BBC news website a few weeks back. The idea – called ‘Slides’ – was to try…
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Faith Spear: The Prison Monitor Who Spoke Out

I recently wrote a piece about a former prison monitor who had raised concerns about the state of prison monitoring. As a result of her…
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‘Little America’: Where the Stars and Stripes fly high

Many years ago, when I worked in Suffolk, I had an idea for a feature about the peculiarly American feel of north west Suffolk. Yes,…