Hundreds of authors including Philip Pullman and Anne Fine say government plans would drastically reduce writers' incomes

Hundreds of writers including children's laureate and Gruffalo author Julia Donaldson, Philip Pullman and Anne Fine are protesting the government's plans to amend educational copyright, with many saying they will be forced to stop writing for schools if the changes go ahead.

Schools currently pay an annual license fee for permission to copy and reuse hundreds of thousands of published works. A government consultation on changing the UK's copyright system proposes amending this arrangement "so that copyright does not unduly restrict education and teaching" [PDF], but this would mean that the authors whose work is photocopied and reused in schools would see their income "seriously reduce[d] or even eradicate[d]", according to the Authors' Licensing and Collecting Society, which currently collects the fees. Last year 18,500 authors were paid for educational use of their work, with many professional education writers earning more than £10,000 in income.

The ALCS has been contacted by "hundreds" of writers condemning the proposal to widen the field for copyright exceptions, it said, with many authors saying they would not be able to afford to continue writing for the educational sector under the potential new rules.

"These changes would be a blow to many writers who don't make much money from royalties and rely on income from photocopying. As someone who has written a hundred books for schools, I don't regard educational books as being less creative than any others," said Donaldson.

Pullman insisted that "it's essential that the originators of such material should be fairly paid for it", while former children's laureate Anne Fine said that money from the ALCS formed a "significant" part of her income. "If this source of income is removed, I would be in a position where I would have to concentrate on areas of writing in which I felt I would get a fairer return for the hours worked," she said. "It will be a particular and ongoing personal and educational loss if writers whose work inspires children feel compelled to absent themselves from the field in order to make a living elsewhere."

Fine was not the only author to say she would be unlikely to continue writing for schools if the changes go ahead. Educational writer Clare West said she used her copying fees to live on while she writes her next book. "If I don't receive them in future, I may not be able to continue my writing career," she said. "What will happen if educational writers can no longer afford to spend time creating books that schools desperately need?" ELT writer Michael Vince called allowing textbooks to be copied for nothing "professional suicide".

"Should I lose the copyright licensing income from ALCS, I must say that the 50% or more cut in my income would be highly demotivating to me continuing to produce new editions, with subsequent loss of benefits to student learning," added former sociology lecturer and textbook author Ken Browne.

While the consultation paper says that "restricting or removing this ability to license could ... deliver significant financial benefits to educational establishments and free up their use of copyright works", it also admits "there is a danger that going too far will undermine the financial incentives that encourage the creation of new educational works". Closing in March, it is currently asking for further evidence of the costs, benefits and implications of the proposed changes.

London's City University says creation of course is in response to student demand

As the underworld steadily increases its grip on literary culture, City University in London is turning to crime, with the launch of an MA devoted to teaching crime fiction and thriller writing.

Launched in response to student demand, and to the growing popularity of the genre, the UK's first creative writing masters dedicated to crime and thriller novels is another harbinger of a "second golden age of crime writing".

The genre is the second biggest in the UK, according to official data, with sales of £87.6m in 2011, while debut thriller Before I Go to Sleep by SJ Watson topped the charts last week. The course will teach budding Agatha Christies and Ian Rankins everything from how to create suspense to new ways to tackle new crimes, thoroughly investigating all aspects of the genre, from police procedurals to psychological thrillers.

"Crime fiction is an increasingly popular genre. With writers like Tom Rob Smith and AD Miller appearing on Man Booker Prize long- and short-lists, the literary acceptance of the genre has never been higher," said programme director Jonathan Myerson, the novelist and playwright. "There is much talk that we are entering a second golden age of crime writing, though this time the country house has been replaced by the inner city estate. Social relevance is a major factor, as too is the quality and craftsmanship of the writing"

City already runs a masters on literary novels as part of its creative writing programme. Six years' worth of students have graduated, with six so far landing publishing deals. Tutors on the literary course include Sadie Jones, David Nicholls, Sarah Waters, Monica Ali, Naomi Alderman, Ronan Bennett, Sarah Hall, and Philip Hensher, and Myerson said he "would expect our tutors on the crime thriller MA to be of the same calibre". Authors are currently being approached, with the novelists Martyn Waites and Barry Forshaw already signed up.

"We take about 12 to 14 students each year on the literary course and would do about the same for the crime MA, and run them in parallel," said Myerson. "Both genres can learn from each other – literary novelists can learn an awful lot from the pacing of crime novels."

If the crime course takes off, Myerson said he would look at expanding the MA to include other genres. "We'll see how this goes, I think," he said. "Young adult would be the next market, though."

Encompasses the application of science, maths and computing skills to solve practical problems

What will I learn?
Engineering degrees cover all things related to developing, providing and maintaining the infrastructure, products and services that society needs - from researching how to manufacture a product to building bridges and roads.

Students will study all, or part, of the life cycle of a product, from conception and design to creation. Science and maths will be the core ingredients, but you will be required to be innovative and to know how to use your creative flair within a legal and ethical framework, and in budget.

A degree in general engineering is for those who want to see what it's all about before choosing to specialise. You will get a basic introduction to each specific engineering discipline, developing your science, maths and computing skills to see how they can solve practical problems - the core ingredient for any degree in this field. Some four-year courses that lead to a master's qualification will offer two years of general study followed by two in a specialism, which is ideal for those torn between, say, civil and electrical engineering.

What skills will I gain?
Lots. Not only will you have acquired the specific skills to your related engineering discipline, but you'll have learned the practical steps of taking your ideas from the drawing board to the real world. You will know how to solve problems and overcome obstacles, particularly when it comes to considering any social and ethical difficulties your work could create. You will know how to work within a budget, be numerate and have good computing skills.

You'll also have an understanding of the legal implications of engineering (health and safety) and how to manage risk, particularly in terms of the environment.

Engineering will involve plenty of teamwork, so you will acquire the ability to argue your ideas, analyse those of others and to work towards a common goal.

You should be able to identify customer needs and ensure that your work is fit for purpose.

Chances are you'll get to work on real-life problems, and will probably do a spot of work experience, so you'll have a good idea of how the industry works.

What job can I get?
Because you've kept your options open, you'll have a wider choice when it comes to finding work. Jobs can be found in engineering firms, local and central government, financial companies and in other work that involves problem solving. The ethical and environmental aspects of engineering degrees could make you an attractive prospect for a not-for-profit organisation or charity.

What will look good on the CV?
• A knowledge and understanding of scientific and mathematical principles.
• The ability to define and develop an economically viable product.
• An understanding of the commercial and economic context of
engineering processes.

There is more useful information on the Institution of Engineering and
Technology's website.

In 2007, floods wreaked havoc in Gloucester. Without lights or TV, people made their own fun ... and nine months later, lots of babies were born. But can the floods really explain the shortage five years on of school places?

In the summer of 2007, you may recall, it rained. A lot. On 20 July in Gloucestershire, the equivalent of two months' rain fell in just 14 hours. Some 5,000 homes and businesses were flooded, 10,000 motorists were stranded on impassable roads, and 2,500 people had to be put up in makeshift rest centres. Whole communities were cut off; the historic town of Tewkesbury, at the junction of the rivers Severn and Avon, turned into an island. More than 48,000 homes were without electricity for days, and when the Mythe water treatment centre was flooded, a further 135,000 – half the homes in Gloucestershire – plus more than 7,500 businesses were also deprived of mains water. In places, the water was 7ft deep.

It was one of the worst civil emergencies Britain has seen. Five years on, Gloucestershire county council has just announced an unexpected shortage of primary school places: across the county, the council needs to find an extra 200 to meet a surge in demand. This can, of course, only mean one thing: "Floods of 2007 leads to baby boom in Gloucestershire," trumpeted the local paper, the Citizen. "If any proof were needed that the terrible floods of 2007 brought Gloucestershire folk together, here it is."

It's such an appealing idea, isn't it? Trapped in their homes as the flood waters swirled outside, unable to go to work as offices and factories shut up shop for want of power or mains water, the good people of Gloucestershire turned to each other for solace, seeking warmth and comfort in that most fundamental and life-affirming of human activities. (Alternatively, if the worst of it was that the lights went off and the telly refused to work, what else was there to do?)

It's certainly an idea people like. "My baby's a flood baby," Nicola Davies of Stroud, mother of five-year-old Huw, declares confidently. "And I'm not the only one, I'll bet. I work in quite a small team, and four of us ended up giving birth nine months after the floods." That, reasons Nicola, has got to be more than mere coincidence.

It crops up routinely, around the world, this idea, in the wake of natural disasters or other crises, from blackouts to blizzards, volcanoes to earthquakes. Gloucestershire Hospitals NHS Foundation Trust wasn't prepared to rule the floods out as the reason behind a spike in the county's birthrate, which did indeed rise to 6,730 in 2008, from just 5,946 in 2005. "Anecdotally," a spokeswoman told the Citizen, "we know of surges in the birth rate in the 1970s, for example, when there were power cuts and people were stuck at home."

Similarly, the Chilean health ministry reported last November that an 8.8-magnitude earthquake that struck the country in February 2010 had produced "a marked increase in obstetric consultations in the most damaged areas" nine months afterwards. Nine months after New York suffered a 10-hour power cut in 1965, there was an apparent surge in the birth rate. "The lights went out and people were left to interact with each other," a sociologist called Paul Siegel excitedly told the New York Times at the time.

In this country, everything from the long, dark nights of the 1978-79 Winter of Discontent to the current recession has been used to provide evidence of an increase in sexual activity, followed by a higher than usual incidence of pregnancy. For baby boom-triggering disasters need not be natural or electrical, they can also be financial.

Last year, it was widely reported that while sales of condoms in the UK had fallen by more than 10% since the start of the current downturn, demand for pregnancy-testing kits had soared by 31% from 2008 and 2010. While the recession may have forced people to tighten their purse strings and cut back on little luxuries like restaurant visits, a pharmacy buyer from Tesco explained: "It seems to have led them to seek pleasure elsewhere."

Appealing as the idea is, though, it doesn't stand up. In almost every case, the apparent baby boom is either not a boom at all, or just part of a perfectly natural fluctuation in the birth rate that would never have been remarked upon if it had not been preceded by an unusual event.

The so-called blackout baby boom in New York in 1966, for example, was no such thing – the birth rate recorded nine months after the great power cut showed now statistically significant difference from that recorded in the preceding five years. ("It is evidently pleasing to many people," the demographer J Richard Udry observed dryly in a 1970 paper comprehensively disproving the theory, "to fantasise that when people are trapped by some immobilising event which deprives them of their usual activities, most will turn to copulation".)

Likewise, the rise in the UK fertility rate between 1977 and 1980 was mainly due to all those 1950s baby-boomers settling down and having kids of their own. And all that speculation about a boom in present-day recession babies is not borne out by the facts: on the contrary, the number of live births in the UK declined by 0.3% between 2008 and 2009 – its first fall since 2001. Equally, Gloucester's supposedly flood-induced shortage of primary school places is, sadly, nothing of the sort: just a reflection of a far broader increase in birth rates across the south-west of England between 2005 and 2008, when we were all still feeling pretty optimistic about the future.

Not convinced? Well, while Gloucestershire's birth rate did indeed climb by 13.6% between 2005 and 2008, other counties in the region did better: Cornwall, for example, managed a 13.6% increase – without the benefit of any devastating floods at all. And if an average of 261 extra babies a year were born in Gloucestershire between those two years, the increase between the flood year of 2007 and the following year was just 168. In other words, if the floods had any effect on the county's birth rate at all, it was to lower it.

Which is, frankly, as it should be: because for most people these days (as opposed to centuries ago, when we needed as many kids as possible to make sure at least some of them would survive long enough to look after us should we ever manage to make it to old age), deciding to have a baby is a major vote of confidence in the future. And that's not, generally, something most people are going to be feeling much of in the depths of a financial and economic crisis, or during a major natural disaster.

In both those unsettling scenarios, concludes Harvard and University of California at Davis economist C-Y Cynthia Lin, our immediate and very human response is, by and large, to stop making so many babies. In the definitive paper on the subject (Instability, Investment, Disasters and Demography, published in the journal Population and Environment 2010), Lin looked at the effects on fertility of successive recessions and natural disasters in Italy and Japan over the course of several centuries. She found that, presumably because of shock and uncertainty, environmental and economic instability make individuals "less willing to make the long-term investments required to raise a family".

But facts are for scientists. "I don't care what the evidence is," says Nicola Davies in Gloucestershire. "I still think there's something in it. Look, the floods prompted this huge feeling of community spirit. After they were over ... We'd been through two weeks of hell, everyone was on an absolute high. It was like a reaffirmation – we'd got through it! "Speaking for myself, there was a bit of alcohol involved. A sense of celebration. And, well, there we were. Or is that too much information?"

Education secretary made decision to give taxpayers' money to organisation that he had promoted as an adviser since 2007

Michael Gove, the education secretary, awarded £2m of public money to an organisation that he promoted as an adviser for four years.

The education secretary personally made the decision to give taxpayers' money to an organisation that distributes funds to pay for better security at Jewish schools. Gove has promoted the Community Security Trust (CST) as an adviser since 2007.

Documents obtained by the Guardian show that Gove personally wrote to the trust confirming that the education department was awarding the money to it. He issued a public statement saying that he had "secured the funding" to the trust.

Richard Benson, the trust's chief executive, replied to Gove twice thanking him for his "personal commitment" to providing the funding. Benson's letter lists Gove as a member of its advisory board, along with more than 50 others.

All the money is distributed by the Community Security Trust to the schools which then employ the security guards. As the trust's role is essentially administrative, none of the money is retained by the trust or pays for any of the trust's work.

The minister has taken a strong stand against antisemitism. However, questions are being asked over whether he should have taken any role in awarding the money to the organisation.

David Miller, of the Spinwatch pressure group, which campaigns for greater transparency in politics, said: "It is blindingly obvious that he should have stood aside, as this is a potential conflict of interest. This is another example of transparency rules in the UK being ineffectual and in serious need of overhaul." Miller first drew attention to Gove's advisory work for the trust.

An education department spokesman said: "Officials were aware that the secretary of state was listed as a member of the Community Security Trust's advisory board. The then permanent secretary was fully content that there was no conflict of interest in the secretary of state making the decision to award the grant."

The spokesman added that the advisory board "has around 55 to 60 members, drawn from a cross-section of society including members of parliament and peers, police, the armed forces, academia and religious and lay leaders of the Jewish community."

"The advisory board is not part of the governance structure of CST and its members have no responsibility for, and play no part in, the day-to-day management of the charity. The advisory board itself does not meet as a separate body."

Recently Gove has come in for criticism over his support for a new royal yacht to mark the Queen's diamond jubilee, while his plan to send a copy of the King James Bible to every school in the country has run into trouble because he has so far been unable to find a philanthropic sponsor for the idea.

Gove made a pledge to give money to improve security at Jewish schools during the 2010 general election campaign, when he was the shadow education minister. After he gained office, he held a meeting with the trust to "discuss the allocation of the funding".

The department has refused a freedom of information request to make public documents relating to the meeting in July 2010, arguing that it was not in the public interest to do so.

Gove's closest aides are being investigated by a watchdog for allegedly abusing the open government act by conducting official business through private email accounts.

Later in 2010, Gove announced that the money had been awarded to fund extra security guards at 39 Jewish voluntary-aided faith schools in England.

Gove said it was wrong that parents had been paying around £1.6m out of their own pockets to fund the security to protect pupils against antisemitic and racist threats.

The trust, set up in 1994 to physically protect British Jews, says that the number of antisemitic incidents in the country has increased over the past decade.

In its latest annual survey, it says that during 2010 there were 639 antisemitic incidents in the country, of which 58 targeted Jewish schools, schoolchildren or teachers.

On Friday a spokesman for Gove said: "It is unbelievable to attack any politician for funding the protection of Jewish children. It is even more extraordinary and frankly offensive to do it on Holocaust Memorial Day."

• This article was amended on 27 January 2012. The original may have implied that the Community Security Trust retained cash or employed school security guards.