The comeback of Channel 4’s fly-on-the-wall series is perfectly timed. It’s a moving, uplifting look at how children can shine with support. What a tonic for all the bad news stories about education in Britain

The trailer for the new series of Educating Yorkshire is a work of art. Shot in one take and clocking in at more than three minutes, it was written and performed by the children of Thornhill community academy in Dewsbury – in collaboration with Dougal Wilson, the director of Paddington in Peru – and takes in a school band, percussionist dinner ladies and a child seemingly being fired out of a cannon from the roof. It’s sweet and funny, but it’s pointed, too, in style and content.

This hasn’t been a great year for the public profile of British secondary schools. The national orgy of hand-wringing prompted by Netflix’s superb Adolescence has led to something approaching despair at the state of education, entrenching the perception that overstretched and under-resourced teachers act as little more than crowd control, leaving children neurotic and dysfunctional, making them sitting ducks for malignant influencers such as Andrew Tate.

Philip Larkin wrote that ‘days are where we live’. Even in the bleakest of times, there are things you can do to improve yours. Former children’s laureate Rosen has some suggestions …

It hardly needs saying but I’ll say it anyway: we live in hard times. Things that some of us thought could and should have been solved haven’t been solved. Things that some of us thought would show signs of progress haven’t progressed. In many ways, wherever we look – locally, nationally or globally – there are things that have got worse. I don’t need to list them.

I’m going to make a big claim: we can’t do anything about the things that bring us down if we are oppressed and depressed by them. We have to have hope. We need to be hopeful creatures in order to live. No matter how much events seem to point towards despair, telling us to be pessimistic, I think we have to find strategies and techniques to be hopeful. In spite of everything, we have to find reasons to go on. As someone once put it in a book, “We can’t go over it, we can’t go under it, we’ve got to go through it.”

Brooklyn Beckham and Nicola Peltz are doing it, Guy Ritchie is doing it – and some people are even doing it with a Mary Poppins impersonator to officiate. Here, couples share why they’ve tied the knot for a second time

When Jade Foster-Jerrett married Dean in 2015, the couple decided that if they were still together in 10 years’ time, they would renew their vows. “We always said that it felt like a big milestone if we ever made it – which, luckily, we did.” This month, they held a ceremony in the forest behind their home, colourful bunting fluttering in the wind, with a Mary Poppins impersonator emerging from the trees to surprise their guests and officiate. “We love to have a laugh,” she says.

Mary Poppins was Foster-Jerrett’s favourite film when she was a child, and she used to watch it with her father, who died in 2020. “We wanted to mark him not being there,” says the 42-year-old children’s entertainer from Romford, London. Her best friend, who was a bridesmaid at her first wedding, did a reading, and the couple gave their 22 guests kites made of paper studded with poppy seeds that they could plant later at home. Afterwards, they returned home for food and drinks with their guests, including their 12-year-old son and Foster-Jerrett’s 19-year-old son from her first marriage. Since the ceremony, she and Dean, a 49-year-old local government officer, “are closer than ever. We realised how much more in love we are with each other.”

The third season of the Amazon teen drama has become a certified phenomenon, encouraging watch parties and intense fan reactions

It’s after work on a Wednesday night, and I’m at a sports bar in downtown Manhattan. It looks exactly like what you’d expect of a bar in the Financial District. Men in button-up shirts stand around a tall table with folded arms, ranting about the current season as multiple baseball games are playing on TV screens all around the bar.

I feel out of place as I wait for a friend, but I know it’s only a matter of time until things change. A stream of women slowly trickles in, group by group. The mood abruptly changes when the TV screens flicker on to a clip of sparkling water. The bar cranks up the volume, a wistful three notes plays over the speaker, the brief theme song of what has become a show so popular that sports bars in Manhattan are throwing watch parties for women who, like me, are years older than the show’s protagonist.

Famed for his cubist portraits, the Spanish genius also created costumes for the Ballet Russes and loved the intensity of bullfights. A new show at the Tate explores the dramatic side of an uncompromising artist

She is called the Weeping Woman, but that is an understatement. She grinds her teeth on a handkerchief that’s like a jagged white-and-blue spearhead while her fingers claw at her face, tearing the flesh to expose her skull. Her chin is two grenades, her eyes are filled with horror – black silhouettes of planes are held in her transfixed eyeballs. They are the German bombers that attacked the Basque town Guernica on 26 April 1937.

Picasso’s Weeping Woman was bought from him by the British surrealist Roland Penrose in November 1937, fresh off the easel. Fifty years later, his son gave it in lieu of tax to the Tate Gallery. Now it is about to star in a Tate Modern exhibition that showcases the museum’s Picasso collection, enhanced with terrific loans from the Musée Picasso in Paris.

Readers recall summer sunrises, paddleboarding and outdoor adventures – and all for much cheaper than other breaks

Parenting in London can often be defined by “don’ts”, says Jen Ablitt, 48, who has a four-year-old daughter – “don’t touch that, stop there, don’t run”.

But whenever they go camping in the countryside, she finds, for a city kid it’s a completely different realm. “Off they go, and you give them more freedom,” she says.

Discovery that clopidogrel is a more effective blood thinner could transform health guidelines worldwide

Doctors have found a drug that is better than aspirin at preventing heart attacks and strokes, in a discovery that could transform health guidelines worldwide.

For decades, millions of people have been advised to take aspirin to reduce their risk of experiencing a serious cardiovascular event. A daily low-dose aspirin makes blood less sticky and helps prevent heart attacks and strokes.

Stanford University staff and academic experts raise questions over Tory leader’s claim of place and partial scholarship offered at 16

Doubts have surfaced over Kemi Badenoch’s claim to have been offered a place at a prestigious US medical school at 16, with admissions staff unable to recall the proposal and the university not providing the course.

The Conservative leader has said in interviews that she was offered a place and a partial scholarship to study medicine – sometimes describing it as pre-medicine – at Stanford University in California, one of the most competitive in the US.

Chinese president hosts bilateral meetings on sidelines of Shanghai Cooperation Organisation summit in Tianjin

Xi Jinping and Vladimir Putin have met on the sidelines of a showpiece summit in China that seeks to challenge US-led, western-dominated blocs and is being attended by the leaders of more than two dozen nations.

The Chinese and Russian leaders, who are closely allied under what they have termed a “limitless” partnership, discussed Putin’s recent meeting with Donald Trump, according to a Kremlin official, who gave no further details.

Met reports ‘small number’ of aggressive masked protesters at what began as peaceful demonstration at Canary Wharf

A police officer was allegedly punched in the face and four people were arrested at an anti-immigration protest march in London on Sunday.

The Metropolitan police said they had been facilitating a peaceful demonstration along Manchester Road and Westferry Road on the Isle of Dogs before “a small number of masked protesters then became aggressive towards members of the public and police”.