PORTLAND, Maine - Pupils at a city middle school will be able to get birth control pills and patches at their student health center after the local school board approved the proposal Wednesday evening.

The plan, offered by city health officials, makes King Middle School the first middle school in Maine to make a full range of contraception available to students in grades 6 through 8, according to the state Department of Health and Human Services.

There are no national figures on how many middle schools, where most students range in age from 11 to 13, provide such services.

'It's very rare that middle schools do this,' said Divya Mohan, a spokeswoman for the National Assembly on School-Based Health Care.

The Portland School Committee voted 7-2 for the measure.

Chairman John Coyne voted against it, saying he felt providing the birth control was a parental responsibility. The other no vote came from Ben Meiklejohn, who said the consent form does not clearly define the services being offered.

Opponents cited religious and health objections.

Diane Miller said she felt the plan was against religion and against God. Another opponent, Peter Doyle, said he felt it violated the rights of parents and puts students at risk of cancer because of hormones in the pill.

A supporter, Richard Verrier, said it's not enough to depend on parents to protect their children because there may be students who can't discuss things with their parents.

Parental permission required
Condoms have been available since 2000 to King students who have parental permission to be treated at its student health center.

About one-fourth of student health centers that serve at least one grade of adolescents 11 and older dispense some form of contraception, said Mohan, whose Washington-based organization represents more than 1,700 school-based centers nationwide.

At King Middle School, birth control prescriptions will be given after a student undergoes a physical exam by a physician or nurse practitioner, said Lisa Belanger, who oversees Portland's student health centers.

Students treated at the centers must first get written parental permission, but under state law such treatment is confidential, and students decide for themselves whether to tell their parents about the services they receive.

Five of the 134 students who visited King's health center during the 2006-07 school year reported having sexual intercourse, said Amanda Rowe, lead nurse in Portland's school health centers.

A high school in Topeka, Kan., stopped providing free condoms to students Wednesday after district officials learned of the month-old program. The district has a policy against providing contraceptives.

The Chancellor rebuked mortgage lenders yesterday for fuelling an 'unsustainable' boom in house prices.

In an exclusive interview with the Daily Mail, Alistair Darling said banks and building societies must be more responsible with their lending.

Predicting a 'slowdown' in the property market, he urged them to be more cautious about how much they lend and take more account of whether the borrower is able to pay back the loan.

His stern message coincided with a warning from the International Monetary Fund that Britain's economy, with its heavy reliance on property, was hugely susceptible to a housing-market crash. Mr Darling said he believed a fall in house price inflation was both desirable and likely.

'An unsustainable house price inflation is not good for individuals, is not good for the economy, so I think it will slow down,' he said.

In a wide-ranging interview, the first since he delivered his controversial 'magpie' Pre Budget Report last week, the Chancellor left little doubt about his irritation with the home loan providers. He demanded that they ask 'more searching questions' to prevent borrowers overstretching themselves.

Last year Abbey, Britain's second biggest lender, changed its rules allowing it to grant loans of five times the borrower's salary, and sometimes up to seven times.

Other lenders, such as Northern Rock and the Halifax subsidiary Birmingham Midshires, were willing to lend 125 per cent of the value of a home. Darlington Building Society offered up to six times salary with its Income Stretch deal.

The Financial Services Authority has also warned that one in ten homebuyers is taking out an interest-only mortgage.

These are popular because the monthly payments are cheaper, but a buyer must repay the original capital sum when the loan ends. The FSA said ten per cent of interest-only borrowers have no idea how they will pay back the money when the time comes, with many simply relying on a buoyant housing market to add equity to their home. Mortgage brokers have also been encouraging homebuyers to lie about their finances to qualify for huge mortgages up to eight times their salary.

'I think that lenders need to be clear that firstly somebody can afford to meet the repayments whatever they are - that they haven't overstretched themselves,' said Mr Darling.

In the early 1990s house prices crashed leaving borrowers with mortgages which were larger than than the underlying value of their homes leaving them in what became known as negative equity. 'If lenders take a more robust view of what they are doing that's not a bad thing at down but that is a relative thing because it has been growing so strongly.'

Clearly, the American 'trailer park' mortgage market which started the credit freeze which brought Northern Rock down has given the Government pause. The impact of the U.S. housing collapse and the emerging problems in Britain is evident today in the latest authoritative forecasts from the Washington-based IMF. It said house price rises in the UK, Ireland and Spain had been surging even faster than those in the U.S. before the recent market collapse, making these countries particularly vulnerable.

'Could a housing correction in western Europe be as deep as in the United States?' asked the IMF report. Its analysis 'suggests that house price overvaluation may be considerably larger '¦ and there would clearly be a sizeable impact on the housing markets in the event of a widespread credit crunch'.

Forecast growth for the leading Western economies has been downgraded from 2.7 per cent to 2.2 per cent next year, with the U.S. barely expanding enough to hold down unemployment. The IMF says that UK output will expand by 2.3 per cent against a spring forecast of 2.7 per cent.

Mr Darling, who is heading to Washington for his first meeting of the Group of Seven richest countries tomorrow, says he will be pressing fellow finance ministers and central bankers for financial market reforms in the wake of the American subprime crisis and the Northern Rock fiasco. 'We have to make sure we have a far better surveillance system to spot these problems and take action to head them off,' the Chancellor argued.

In contrast to the IMF, the Chancellor is hopeful that even if house prices start to slow or even fall, we are not heading for an early 1990s style crash.

'I am confident we can get through this, but we are going to go through a turbulent period,' he said. 'That is why I downgraded my expectations for growth quite sharply because of what is happening in the United States and in Europe as a whole.'

He does believe that over the longer term there could be a correction in the housing market but it will take place in a orderly manner. 'What you want to avoid is a very rapid unplanned adjustment,' he said.