This being the Argus, he gets a right shoeing in the comments. This is my favourite:

Christianity! COME ON!

The belief that a cosmic Jewish Zombie who was his own father can make you live forever if you symbolically eat his flesh and telepathically tell him you accept him as your master, so he can remove an evil force from your soul that is present in humanity because a ‘rib-woman’ was convinced by a talking snake to eat from a magical tree… yeah, makes perfect sense. It is this sort of belief that will make us all Americans if we are not careful!

Predictably, the complaints about the rhyme itself are overwhelmed by complaints that reprimanding the teacher represents ‘political correctness gone mad’.Now I’m not black nor a boy, so I can’t comment first-hand on whether it would make me feel stereotyped as a rapist, with a hint of underage sex.  I’m also neither a young girl nor a rape victim so I can’t comment first-hand on whether I would feel comfortable having a crime against my person trivialised as merely ‘saucy’ – let alone the bizarre suggestion that virgins are somehow missing out on the pleasures of rape, but I’m sure everyone would have been happier with a less provocative mnemonic.

One argument used in support of this teacher is that the rhyme does work and is memorable and so everything is all right.  This is true to the extent that the alternatives offered up are quite frankly poor, but surely somebody could come up with something even more memorable that even black boys and young girls would be comfortable reciting – unless we don’t want them to get involved in electronics?

Wikipedia gives these alternatives, amongst others:

1. Bad boys run our young girls behind victory garden walls
2. Big boys race our young girls but Violet gernerally wins
3. Bye bye Rosie, off you go Bristol via Great Western
4. B B Roy of Great Britain has very good wife
5. Bak bro yeah greasy blubber’s very grabbable, why?
6. Big brown rabbits often yield great big vocal groans when gingerly slapped

The last one has the advantage of also including the last two colours, gold and silver, that most rhymes leave out, but none of them is particularly good and I really can’t see why the Wikipedia article describes No. 5 as easy to remember.

So here’s the challenge.  Use some of the energy wasted in moaning about ‘political correctness gone mad’ to come up with a mnemonic for BBROYGBVGW(GS) that is really easy to remember, so easy to remember that even die-hard racists would prefer to use it.  ‘Saucy’ is fine – but only a definition of saucy that doesn’t class rape as an amusing incident.

I don’t think I can do it, but I’m sure somebody out there can.

• Blair became really obscure,  yet Gordon blew voters, gaining weight, going sideways
• barbecue burning ready – obviously you get blowy violent gales with golden showers

See.  I said I couldn’t do it.  Why not show me up by coming up with a really good alternative.

The reason I was trying to look up governors is this:  I was reading this story in a local paper about Three Bridges Junior School being put into special measures after getting the lowest possible rating from Ofsted. The latest report gives an overall rating of 4.

It seemed like a very rapid decline, since the previous report in July 2008 was nowhere near as bad – getting either ‘good’ or ‘satisfactory’ in every category.  OK, there were no ‘outstandings’ at all but then there were no ‘inadequate’ s either.

While looking at that I noticed that the chair of governors was somebody called Martin Grice and the name Grice rang a bit of a bell because Ryan Grice is a serial BNP candidate in Crawley elections.  It turns out that a Martin Grice from Three Bridges appeared on the BNP membership list that appeared on Wikileaks a couple of years back.

It may just be a coincidence. There may well be two Martin Grices in Three Bridges but it is very difficult to establish one way or the other. The address for the school’s own website does not work: it just gives a ‘Directory listing denied’ error message.  I can’t even see if the chair is a parent governor, staff representative or an appointment by the LEA, or when they first became a governor.

I suppose I could go through every set of council minutes on the WSCC website and maybe get somewhere, but I don’t fancy that, so how can I (and the parents of pupils at the school) know whether there is indeed a BNP member in charge or just somebody with the same name?

The other 36 didn’t and deserve what they get the next time they face the electorate, or get introduced by James Naughtie on Radio 4.

So well done to…

• Annette Brooke (Dorset Mid & Poole North)
• Sir Menzies Campbell (Fife North East),
• Michael Crockart (Edinburgh West),
• Tim Farron (Westmorland & Lonsdale),
• Andrew George (St Ives),
• Mike Hancock (Portsmouth South),
• Julian Huppert (Cambridge),
• Charles Kennedy (Ross, Skye & Lochaber)
• John Leech (Manchester Withington),
• Stephen Lloyd (Eastbourne)
• Greg Mulholland (Leeds North West),
• John Pugh (Southport),
• Alan Reid (Argyll & Bute),
• Dan Rogerson (Cornwall North),
• Bob Russell (Colchester)
• Adrian Sanders (Torbay),
• Ian Swales (Redcar),
• Mark Williams (Ceredigion)
• Roger Williams (Brecon and Radnorshire),
• Jenny Willott (Cardiff Central),
• Simon Wright (Norwich South)

For a roundup of all the best newspaper photos I can recommend the Sexy A-Levels blog and for an alternative view of the media coverage, the ever-amusing As If… blog with their story Outrage as BBC shows repeats of last years’ A-level students jumping up and down.Well done to Chrystal anyway.  She is off to university, which is more than I ever did, and has A levels, which I don’t.

So. Do I think that the exams are easier than when I took them?  Or is Chrystal more intelligent than I am.  Or are teachers better now than they used to be?  All are possible, but I think it is much more likely that schoolkids today are a lot more motivated than they were thirty years ago and work harder, and that the education system has improved.

I suspect this has a lot to do with there being a lot more university places now than there were thirty years ago, which allows them to make offers of places to lower grades, which makes getting them more realistic, which supplies a greater motivation.

It may also be that students are encouraged to take A levels based on what they are likely to get the best result at rather than what would interest or challenge them more. Which is not necessarily a bad thing.

It is also possible that students are discouraged from taking courses that they really want to, because they might do badly and screw up the school’ s league tables results.  Which, I think, would be a bad thing.

All together, the education system is now very focused on exam results, which is why they are improving – not because exams are getting easier.

The popular opinion of teenagers is that they know everything, or think they do, but that is not how the students came across to me.  I am sure they do have opinions on all sorts of things, but they seemed to be genuinely interested to hear another point of view.

I think the real difference is that they sometimes ask questions without knowing the answer.  That does not mean they will accept what you say as the answer, but they will file it away, compare it to what their teacher has said maybe, or what they have heard elsewhere and use to make up their own minds.  Well I hope so anyway.

In so many other situations questions are asked by somebody with an entrenched opinion who only wants your opinion so they can argue with it.  Or agree if you are lucky, but I think people prefer to have a chance to argue.  That’s the way it seems anyway, unless it is just me being unduly cynical.

In the case of Christ’s Hospital there was the added benefit of there being very little pressure.  Any students that are old enough to vote will be registered elsewhere anyway.  It reduces the temptation to just say what people want to hear rather than what you actually think.

My normal reaction when visiting a school is for at least part of my mind to wander back to my own schooldays and half-wish they could have gone on for ever.  This week I had a slightly different reaction.  It crossed my mind how good it might have been to have gone into teaching.  Too late for that now,  and maybe they were on their best behaviour and are usually a pit of malevolent chaos, but that is not the impression I got.

I reckon it could be very rewarding, especially in a subject like politics where so much of it is (or should be IMO) just encouraging students to think for themselves rather than cramming them with the ‘right’ answers.

Anyway, it was a good opportunity to get used to speaking so that the more contentious events will be a little easier to handle, and it helped me in another way too: it made me think about a lot of things and to have to work out what I think about them.  I have always found it tedious when politicians seem to have a strong opinion on everything, and wondered why they are so afraid to say “I don’t know”, but at the other extreme I’m sure the class would have found it even more tedious to get “I don’t know” as the answer to every other question.

I have been trying to get into the mental discipline of remembering that so much in politics is just opinion – to not say that such-and-such is wrong but to say that I think such-and-such is wrong.  I’m sure that will be harder when faced with opponents who are sure they are right and with questions that have hidden agendas attached, rather than open questions but at least I have had a bit of practise now.

Today I went straight from work to visit politics students at Christ’s Hospital and bore the life out of them and on the way home I passed through Horsham and remembered that there was a planning meeting going on which my colleagues in Horsham Labour party were addressing so I stopped off for that.

More about that later. Probably.

Today’s events made me all nostalgic for several reasons.  First of all, the visit to Christ’s Hospital remined me of my own time at school.  Obviously my school was nowhere near as grand, but it was still a co-educational boarding school out in the country and I was wondering how life in such an establishment will be different now, and how it would be similar.

I remember my last year at school very fondly.  Video games were very much in the future, as were video recorders, let alone computers and the internet.  If we had Spotify at school would it have made life better or worse I wonder?  Certainly we would have been exposed to more tunes, but would have missed out on listening to the same few Yes and Genesis albums over and over again.

If I remember rightly, our last summer was a glorious one and having got exams out of the way, we spent a lot of time swimming, sunbathing outside the pool, and making use of the athletics facilities – not that you would believe it to see me now.  And punk was just starting to filter through to us as well.

Chatting to the students, I speculated that mobile phones must make everything different. At my school there was a single pay phone between 250 pupils so phone calls home were a rarity.  Now they can be texting friends and family all the time.  They pointed out that mobile phones are not allowed for the junior years.  In my mind I was just thinking that bottles of Captain Morgan rum were not allwed at my school but they were stashed away in the senior common room anyway

The Horsham council planning meeting made me nostalgic in a different way, for a different time.  Although the set-up was totally different to Crawley’s committee rooms, there were enough reminders of my time as Chair of Development Control – the inaudible sound system, the press scribbling away, the endless maps.

I have been to a few of the Crawley planning meetings since leaving the council but at those I felt that I knew exactly what was going on because the people and surroundings were so familiar.  In many cases I could guess what the councillors were going to say before they said it, because they were returning to familiar favourite topics.  In Horsham tonight I appreciate more what it must have been like as a first-time visitor.

A few of the councillors are now familiar to me, as is the chief executive, but it took me a while to work out who was in the chair and which people round the table were planning officers and other staff.  Not being able to hear anything much that was said did not help of course.  Nice to see that a fandamental failure to understand that microphones work best if they are spoken into was not just a peculiar trait of crawley councillors!

Having sat through that I feel I should retrospectively apologise to every member of the public who ever attended one of the planning meetings I chaired.  I did try to introduce all the dramatis personae at the beginning and make some explanation of procedure to the public, but I now realise that I probably did not go anywhere near far enough.

Anyway, I think we got a result, of sorts, in the planning decision, and I had a thoroughly good time at the school, on top of a reasonably productive day at work so all together I think it was a good day.

I will be glad when people stop asking me if I am going to transfer from Horsham to Crawley as a candidate though.  There are four very good reasons why I can’t/won’t – the fifth of which is that Horsham Labour party has already paid some money towards printing election leaflets with my name all over them.

Having said that I do have reservations about it.  In practical terms I wonder how many parents are capable of providing the depth and breadth of education that a school full of specialist teachers can.  I consider myself reasonably well-informed and capable in basic science, maths, English, and art, all backed up by a not-too-bad library and of course the internet, but I don’t think I could teach a child all of that.  I certainly couldn’t teach a child so that they reached a higher level than me.

There must be parents who can do that, and that makes me wonder how they find the time to embark on full-time education and how they fund it.  Also, if they are that capable, why are they keeping it to themselves and not using those skills – perhaps by being a teacher in a school?

As for the motives, how often is the real fear not that a child will be victimised, but that they will be exposed to ideas the parents do not approve of and might one day form their own opinions?  How many of these home-educated children are being protected from bullying and how many are being protected from Darwin’s theories, for example?

I think it can only be good news that local authorities now have the right to inspect parents who are home educating, for all sorts of reasons, but I still think that in most cases it is the children who are missing out on opportunities to develop interpersonal skills and also to develop the ability to cope with adversity – to thicken their skin a bit.  Is there a danger of children growing up so protected and sheltered that they are really going to find it hard to cope with the real world?   How are they going to cope when thrown into the workplace?  Or are they going to follow their parents and not work but stay at home educating their own children?

Other practical considerations.   Schools have lots of facilities that you just will not have at home – every type of musical instrument, potters wheels and kilns, fully-equipped woodwork and metalwork shops, sporting equipment and so on.  Children can try all these things until they find one they like and get on with.  Will parents be able to afford and have the patience to keep buying these things on the off-chance they will be suitable?    A child could have a natural trumpet-playing ability that is never discovered because their parents are totally non-musical.

You may be well-educated and pretty fluent in French, but the child decides at fourteen that they want to speak German instead.  How do you teach them that if you don’t speak it yourself?    I think the danger is that it wouldn’t happen because there has been fourteen years of indoctrination that French is better to learn.  How do you teach a child to read music if you can’t?   How are they going to discover that natural cricketing ability if they are never allowed to mix with 21 other children?

Sorry, but I reckon home education should be a last resort in extreme circumstances and not a lifestyle choice for those afraid of having their children turn out different to themselves.

On the plus side though, it does mean you can take the kids on holiday during term time when it is cheaper.

The topic of discussion was suposed to be about why people, and especially young people, are less interested in politics these days.To be fair, although there were some diversions, the discussion did stay broadly on-topic.  I don’t think there was any real conclusion, but that is no surprise because anybody expecting a simple answer to such a question would be supremely optimistic.

The problem, of course, is that there is not a single reason anyway.  Every individual who is not interested in politics has their own reason so you can’t even just ask because all you will get is that person’s reason and not some mythical single unified cause of apathy.

Not that Collyer’s was the place to go and ask anyway.  By its very nature the politics society was full of people who are interested.

What was refreshing after meetings at work, in the Labour party or in the council, was the character trait of youngsters that they are quite happy to ask difficult questions honestly.  Faced with a candidate who, let’s be honest here, has no realistic chance of winning in the next election many adults would tactfully avoid mentioning that – plus a few who would go out of their way to just rub it in.  This evening I was asked why I am bothering to stand when I’m not likely to win.

A good question.  The normal honest answer for candidates is that they are ‘paying their dues’ and getting experience on their political CV for a future safe seat somewhere else.  That doesn’t apply in my case.  I would not be interested in standing in a safe seat hundreds of miles away.

For me it was mainly because there are enough people – at least 10,000 I guess – who agree with the Labour party and who want a candidate to vote for.  If they do not have a Labour candidate they are being denied their chance to take part in the democratic process.  Personally I would be royally pissed off if I did not have a Labour candidate to vote for.

The follow-up to that was to ask what is the point of standing with no realistic hope of success.  The simple answer to that is that it is the whole point of democracy.  If you decide that party A is guaranteed to win so no other parties stand then you don’t have democracy any more – just 400-500 constituencies with a single candidate and elections in just those which are marginal.

Of course, many would argue that I have effectively described the current situation under first-past-the-post, and unofficially I have to agree with them.

Anyway, it was worth the stressful drive from work (I hate driving in a hurry) to get a different perspective on things.  I hope the society thrives and carries on long enough to ask me back sometime.

We are always hearing suggestions from the opposition that the government inferferes too much, that policing/health/education should be left to the experts without politicans who do not know as much sticking their oar in, but they are hollow words.

I actually agree with the words the Tories say when they ask for the professionals in a field to decide how they should do their own job, whether it is the police, teachers, soldiers or fire fighters. Unfortunately I don’t think the Tories agree with the words: they just say them when they think it will make people like them.

A key phrase in the piece is:

Translated, this means that teachers would rule the roost, accountable to no one but themselves, using the outdated progressive methods of the Sixties.

Can’t have teachers ‘ruling the roost’ can we?  Using all that dangerous book-learnin’ they fill them with during their teacher training?

If I was a teacher I would be in the union for my own protection.  I certainly wouldn’t then vote for a party where influential people are openly declaring war on my union and profession.

(Hat tip to ZaNuLieBore over at Common Endeavor for linking to that article in their post about schools)