A Looking Glass World

We do seem to live in an increasingly black-is-white world.

A couple of weeks after the Nightjack furore, and two or three months after a nurse was struck off for helping Panorama to expose the appalling conditions in which elderly cancer patients were being 'treated', a dinner lady apparently faces the sack for telling David and Claire Scott that their seven-year-old daughter had been tied up and whipped with a skipping rope by bullies at school.

According to The Times, the school says the dinner lady's actions in discussing a pupil outside of school amount to 'gross misconduct' - notwithstanding that she was talking to the child's own parents.

Meanwhile, a mother who lied to get her son into a decent school won't be prosecuted, but the preposterous Ed Balls has ordered a major investigation into how many people are lying to get their kids into good schools.

How about an investigation into why they might feel the need to do this in the first place?

The answer is, as Frank Chalk pointed out in his book (an extract from which you can read here), that some of our state schools are absolutely terrible.

Unfortunately, they tend not to be the schools attended by the children of people who matter - Tony Blair, for instance, was able to ship his kids halfway across London to the Oratory School, rather than have them attend the shoddy comps in Islington. He didn't have to do anything so vulgar as lie about where he lived to arrange it, either (not that he was ideologically opposed to lying, mind you).

I was listening to Any Questions on R4 on Friday and I think I heard the writer Will Self say that he was against private education on principle but that he sent his own children to private schools.

Paul Weller, of course, recorded Eton Rifles, and attacked private education at every opportunity - until he had school-age children of his own, at which point he realised that the state schools near him were appalling and underwent a Damascene conversion.

Frank Chalk for Education Secretary, I say!

Posted by Dan