Several staff from a Kent prison have been taken to hospital after their canteen food was spiked with drugs.
Paramedics were called to HMP Swaleside on the Isle of Sheppey last Thursday. Hear from Andy Hamlin from the Criminal Justice Workers Union.
A childcare worker has described the moment a baby boy started choking on his food at an Ashford nursery.
Nine-month-old Oliver Steeper was being fed penne Bolognese by Nazia Begum when he started to gag and gasp in September 2021.
The price of a bus pass to help children get to school in Kent is set to increase by £100.
The Kent Travel Saver currently costs £450 a year but is likely to go up next term. Hear from councillors and a concerned parent.
Psychologists from the University of Kent are working on a new campaign to highlight the impact of social media on young people's mental health.
They've teamed up with theatre group Portrait and local secondary school students to produce a performance called Generation FOMO - which stands for Fear Of Missing Out.
A school teacher from Benenden is taking on an incredible challenge to raise money for a Kent charity.
Nick Rendall has set himself the task of running 1,000km in 100 days in support of homelessness charity Catching Lives.
And in sport, Gillingham have announced they're releasing eight players and making four available for transfer.
Three have also returned to their parent clubs following loan spells while new contracts have been offered to Glenn Morris and Dom Jefferies. Our sports reporter Luke Cawdell has the details.
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how how how how how how how how three. Nine-month-old Oliver Steepa was being fed bolognese by Nazia Begum when he started to gag and gasp in September 2021. He died in hospital six days later. Well reporter James Pallant says an inquest heard from Ms Begum and the nurseries manager Debbie Orcock. Their testimonies revealed that multiple members of the Jelly Bean staff, including Ms Begum and Mrs Alcock, did not have up-to-date pediatric first aid training at the time. Ms Begum's emotional testimony took jurors through the accident in detail, describing the moment that Oliver inhaled a piece of minced meat, gagged and stopped breathing. During Ms Alcock's evidence, she recounted how the baby turned a shocking blue purple color before she attempted to resuscitate him with CPR. And we learned on Monday that Oliver's parents assumed that their child was only being given pureed food of the nursery. At the time of his enrollment in September 21, he had barely two teeth and he had just begun weaning off breast milk. But the testimony today of the two Jelly Bean staff members revealed discrepancies between the parents' expectations of what Oliver was being fed and what staff members were actually giving him. Ms Begum, who was not Oliver's key carer, said she could not remember having any detailed conversations with Mrs Steepa about exactly what he should be fed. And Mrs Alcock stated that she would not have expected Oliver at nine months to have been fed pureed food, rather, quote, textured food, some lumps in his food to encourage him to accept those lumps, some finger foods like toaster banana, unquote. When he choked, Oliver was being fed finely chopped up penny bolognese. The inquest scheduled to go on until the end of next week is still to hear from nursery chefs, paramedics and an offstead representative. The hearing in Maidstone continues. Kent's online reports. The price of a bus pass to help children get to school in Kent is set to increase by 100 pounds. The Kent travel saver currently costs £450 a year. Council bosses were able to keep the price on hold this year, but say inflation means it'll have to go up next term. Rebecca Parr is a parent. She's not happy with the increase. We are in a fortunate position where I've changed jobs. I know work from home, so I can be on hand if necessary. My partner is self-employed. If he has to do the school run, it costs him. He's going to get to work late. I appreciate that the cost of living, the cost of everything has increased. I do appreciate that. However, for the service that they're providing, it's not good value for money. There's no promises that the service that we get in will improve for that amount of money. It's substandard. We get days where we've had to do emergency school runs because the bus hasn't turned up, it hasn't broken down, and the attitude is kind of oh well, and it carries on regardless. So I think they need to be a bit more transparent on why they're making those increases, and if the service is going to improve as a result of those increases. The authority in CISA service is still good value for money, but Swale Independent Councilor Mike Bulldog is worried about the impact it'll have on families. Again, as I say, you've got to put it in context of the huge increases that have gone on over the last four years. So anything like that should already been built into those sorts of increases. Another £100 on top of what people have had to suffer in the last few years really is too much, and I don't think it's fair, because as I say, people are running out of choices. When you put people into a corner like that, it comes to a lot of desperation, a lot of hardship in some cases. Councillor Sean Holden is chair of the Environment and Transport Committee at KCC. He says they have no choice but to increase the charge. I think the overall cost is about £14.5 million, and the council gets back about £9.5 million, so the overall cost is £5.5 million to kind of council and taxpayers. That's the subsidy we extend, and the costing of it is set by the prices that the bus companies charge. Kind of council doesn't brand any buses. We are subsidising the use of buses by people. We also give direct subsidies to the bus companies. Very unusual for a kind of council to do that, very few. They were all speaking to the local democracy reporting service, and you can watch a report on this story by heading to the KMTV pages on the website. Elsewhere, hundreds of people have now signed a petition calling on stagecoach to reinstate axed bus services across Canterbury, Home Bay and Whitstable. The company launched their revised timetable earlier this month, reducing the frequency of buses on some routes. Any petition which gathers more than 1,000 signatures can be taken to council, so far 650 people have signed. Cants online reports. Two people have been arrested following the theft of cables which left villages near Maidstone without the internet. Homes in Maryworth were cut off earlier this month, causing an estimated 3,000 pounds of damage to farmland. Two men in their 20s were tracked down using AMPR data, once been charged with criminal damage, the other released on bail. Follow Kent Online on socials to see pictures of a woman police hunting following a robbery in Canterbury. The victim had a handbag stolen by another woman in Burghate on the evening of May the 4th. Investigators have now shared CCTV images of the suspect. Figures seen by Kent Online show the popularity of Airbnb's is booming in Kent's seaside towns. Whitstable has 542 for rent in Margate, that numbers 443 and Broadstairs and Folkestone have around 308. Now, while some say the influx of tourists is good for the economy, others reckon they're stripping the life out of communities and creating ghost towns during the off-season, where you can read a special report today by Chris Bridger by heading to the website. Now, psychologists from the University of Kent are working on a new campaign to highlight the impact of social media on young people's mental health. They've teamed up with Theatre Group Portrait and local secondary school students to produce a performance called Generation FOMO. That stands for Fear of Missing Out. It's hoped it'll provide new understandings about teenagers' use of phones as we continue to mark Mental Health Awareness Week. Playwright Isabelle Dafoe has been speaking to Lauren Hampshire. I was invited to work with the Marlow Theatre a couple of years ago with their youth company, so I was working with actors who were between 18 to 21, and they were sharing with me stories about their mental health. I realized a lot of it was stemming from their use of smartphones and social media, so they would have been the first generation to be given a device quite young. In their early 20s now, they were talking with them about how they felt that they were all given a device far too young, and they'd all seen inappropriate content by the age of 10 or 11. And as a mother of two young children myself, and also as my position, so the Portrait Theatre, we are a resident theatre company at the University of Kent, and so as our position on campus surrounded by young people, I was like, we have a responsibility here to kind of explore this issue a lot more. So we've been talking with Dr Lindsey Cameron from the School of Psychology about this, and she was also quite passionate about the topics that we got working together on it, and I've been interviewing quite a lot of young people now, so this is very early stage to this play. I've been working with young people, aging from 10 to about 27, and the whole purpose of the interviews are to create a play, so everything that I write, nothing is fictional, it's all taken from those interviews. What are some of the issues then that have come out of the interviews? What are some of the main things that kids or young people are struggling with with their mental health as a result of social media? You know, Lauren, I'm really shocked. I interviewed a group of children the other day that friends of my son, who's 11, and he's in year six, and so there were six of them. Three of them, including my son, don't have a phone, and the rest of them do, and in their class, my son is one of four out of 28 who don't have a smartphone, and the ones that do have a phone were putting on the table the word addiction already at the age of 10 or 11. They are already aware that they don't want to become addicted to their phones, they're frightened of that, they're aware of how it affects their mental health, the group, the WhatsApp groups that they seem to be on the school, WhatsApp groups are very loud, and inappropriate content is already being shared at that age on those groups, and they're only primary school children. And then when you talk to older young people, they will be very honest. Some of them will say how porn is affecting their lives, and coloring very much their relationships and their sexual experiences, they will tell you that porn is everywhere, on every social media platform that they use. A lot of them talk about also eating disorders, self-harm, and all of that, and how they can get so much inspiration from various social media platforms that they're on. That's quite frightening, I think, the amount of content that they're digesting. Kent Online News. A Kent Secondary School has applied to be the first in the UK to have a skate park within its grounds. Skateboarding is already taught at Folkestone Academy, and the plans are for a piece of unused land previously said to not be level enough for sport. The proposals include a shallow bowl, two small ramps, a rail, ledge, and seating. Fundraising efforts to help air ambulance Kent Surrey Sussex by the helicopter have reached a million pounds in just six weeks. The money will secure the future of the helicopter, which is an essential lifeline for people across the county who need urgent medical treatment. Any additional money raised will go towards improving and developing their services. Now, a school teacher from Benenden is taking on an incredible challenge to raise money for Kent charity. Nick Rendell has set himself the task of running a thousand kilometers in just 100 days, all in support of homelessness charity catching lives. He's been running at 10 kilometers a day since the end of March. It's our centenary this year, so we're 100 years old. For that, we came up with the idea of doing 100 acts of kindness over the year. I was talking with my wife, saying, "Well, I enjoy running," and I think she jokingly said, "Well, why don't you do 110 Ks?" And I thought about it, and I thought, "Well, why not?" I really enjoy running, and actually to have a challenge for a charity which is linked to the community in which I live, the catching lives charity, it was almost something that I felt I compelled to do. And so the more I spoke about it, the more it became a reality, the more people I told, the more I had to actually think that this is going to be really happening. So I started really preparing for an October, and to see if I could actually do it, and I thought by December, I could. So it was something I'd mentioned to the school as an act of kindness, so I'm in the midst of it now, and it's going OK. Can you tell me a little bit about catching lives and your association with the charity? So within my community in Benetton Village, we've got a historic kind of link with catching lives. I'm running a memory of a great member of the village community, Tracy Clerich, who very sadly passed away a few years ago, and he had a very strong connection with catching lives, and a number of the members of our community volunteer at catching lives, which is a homeless charity in working in Canterbury with a basic country, East Kent as well, working with those, suffering from homelessness or edge of homelessness, or insecure accommodation. And I went to visit the charity before I began the challenge to meet Tansen, the head of the charity, and actually to have a look at what they do. And it's an inspiring place. They offer food, they offer health, they offer medical support, they offer mental health support to those really in our society who are suffering. And I think it's a way that we can actually help in a very small way, support them to get them back into a sense of secure housing or to support them any way they need. And I think I was inspired by my visit to really just crack on with this challenge. And just giving page has been set up, which has already raised more than a thousand pounds, and you can follow his progress on Instagram. Ken's online sports. Football and Jillingham have announced they're releasing eight players and making four available for transfer. Three have also returned to their parent clubs following loan spells, while new contracts have been offered to Glenn Morris and Don Jeffries, with all the details in full. Here's our Jills reporter, Luke Cordell. The retain list was put together before Mark Bonner got the job as manager, but obviously the club wanted to give him the final say on who was going to go and who was going to stay. He's now giving that the green light. It was released yesterday, Wednesday. We now know what players are going to be leaving. There's eight departures. Most of them are young professionals. There's four players that are under contract, but have been available for transfer. They're not really many surprises in there. George Lapsley, one of them, hasn't really done what people would have expected him to have done at the club, attacking midfielder. Ollie Hawkins striker played a lot of games once he overcame a persistent heel injury. But once Josh Andrews came into the team, he was different class really and had a lot of pace about him up top, which is something Hawkins hasn't got really. Ashley Naddison has got pace, started the season quite well, but his former has really sort of dropped off. There's no surprise that the club probably want to move him on. Scott Malone experienced left back, no doubt probably on decent money. If the club can move him on, then that would free up funds for someone else. They've already got Max Clark who can play left back so they're sort of sued in that position. Of the players that are going, Sean Williams are captain, fastly experienced, great player in his day, but ages caught up with him in the end. So no surprise to see him go. McCauley Bond, striker. I think a lot of people remember his infamous car crash on the way to training. Didn't really help his course. He finished the season at Cambridge United. At the end of the day, didn't really school enough goals, didn't really have the impact that anybody wanted him to have. So another player going and another wage released where new manager Bonner can bring in one of his own picks. There are two players that are out of contract that have been offered new terms. Glen Morris, 40 year old goalkeeper, who might be a bit of a surprise. No doubt Jake Turner will be the number one goalkeeper next season, but Glen Morris has enabled deputy. So if they can get him tied up for another year, then that'd be great. Dom Jeffries is an up-and-coming midfielder, high hopes for him. He's at a contract, but because he's under the age of 24, Gillingham can claim compensation if he does move on to another club. And I'd say it's probably a 50-50 call, whether he stays. There's quite a few clubs that are believed to be interested in him. And Neil Harris might want to take him to Millwall as well. He's obviously a big fan of his, so we'll have to wait and see what happens with that one. Six youngsters have gone. They were largely made up of the B team. They played in the B team last season, as well as going out and low towards the end of the season. But now it's Dantha to Bonner to pick the players he wants, fill those gaps. He's got a clear picture now of what he needs. So it's all over to them, and we look forward to seeing what sort of players they come in. You can see that retained list and let us know what you think by heading to Kent online. Meantime, Stephen Clements has said it was a privilege to manage Gillingham, and he wasn't ready for it to be his last waltz at the club. He was sacked at the end of the season after failing to guide them into the league two play-offs. In a statement, he thanked the club's owners, staff and fans, and says he's determined to be head coach or manager again. Well, that's all from us for today. Thanks ever so much for listening. Don't forget, you can follow us on Facebook, X, Instagram, TikTok and threads. You can also get details on the top stories to direct your email each morning via the briefing. To sign up to that, you just need to head to kentonline.co.uk And whilst you're on the site today, don't forget to check out our latest. Eat my words, food review. News you can trust. This is the Kent Online Podcast.
