Best Schools - Nearly half of the British Army's latest intake of officer cadets were privately educated

A Freedom of Information request has revealed 49% of those who entered the Royal Military Academy at Sandhurst in January came from fee-paying schools.

Recent heads of the Army have more commonly attended one of Britain's elite public schools.

There is a reason why the military's has close ties with private education. There's a financial incentive to continue the tradition.

The Continuity of Education Allowance (CEA) is, as the name suggests, designed to give service personnel stability for their children while they move around the country or abroad.

The Ministry of Defence contributes around £80m a year towards the boarding school fees of service personnel. The allowance is available to all service personnel who meet the criteria. But it is officers who make the most use of it, even though they are a smaller proportion of the armed forces.

Last year, 2,720 children of officers received the allowance - compared to 1,765 children of those serving in the ranks. The allowance is capped at £21,000 per child, per year.

Given that there are few state schools with boarding facilities most of that money subsidises private school fees - including some of the most elite in the country - including Eton, Harrow and Marlborough College.

Exam board launches investigation after Maths A-level paper is leaked online for third year in a row

Edexcel, which is owned by Pearson, confirmed that “blacked out images” of two exam questions had been circulating on social media ahead of Friday's exam.

Pictures of two questions were posted from a Twitter account - which has since been deleted - the day before the exam, with the details scribbled out. An accompanying message invited students to get in touch via a direct message “if you want tomorrow’s A-level maths, stats and mechanics paper 3 exam”.

Others claimed that the entire paper had been leaked and was circulating in group message conversations on the morning of the exam.

This is the third consecutive year that questions from Edexcel’s Maths A-level papers have surfaced online ahead of the exam.

Roughly 60,000 students took EdExcel’s Maths A-level, which consisted of three exam papers spread over last week and this week.

This is the first cohort of pupils to take the reformed Maths A-level, which was designed to be more challenging and better prepare sixth form students for university.