IN the event of a hung Parliament and my being invited to form the next government I already have my first decision formulated.

That oily mobile phone offender Mr. Balls will be first for the chop at education. In his place as minister for education in my government of all talents will be schools inspector, teacher and raconteur Gervase Phinn.

Yorkshireman Gervase, who launched the Kids Keswick booklet and entertained a packed audience at the Theatre by the Lake earlier this year, is that rarity these days — a man who speaks common sense about schools.

And after years of meddling and bureaucracy, it surely is time for a breath of common sense through the classrooms of Britain where we need to escape the welter of paperwork, guidelines, directives and strategies which are regularly handed down from on high and get back to valuing teachers and teaching.

The word “change” has been bandied about in the general election campaign like it was some open sesame to a better, brighter future. But let’s stop and think for a moment. Change does not always lead to improvement. Just ask the teachers who have been beaten, baffled and bewildered by it in recent times.

Some teachers are threatening to boycott the next round of SATS — standard assessment tests. Ordinarily I would not back boycotts, but in this case they have my sympathy and, no doubt, the sympathy of Gervase Phinn, who has a healthy cynicism about league tables which only tell you that the more academic the kids you have in your school in the first instance, the better your results will be.

There are whingers in every walk of life, but too many teachers say they feel overworked and undervalued for it to be standard moaning. Too many of them leave within the first five years, driven out by excessive bureaucracy and disillusion.

In my far off school days I was never a great learner. Although I passed the 11 plus and went to a grammar school, my GCE results were lamentable. However, one English teacher encouraged me into writing about things that interested me and set me on the way to a career doing something that I always wanted to do.

How we need teachers like that today. Teachers who are motivated and committed, not worn down and wearied by endless form-filling requirements, development plans, risk assessments and such like.

Speaking to Gervase Phinn during his recent visit to Cumbria I could not help thinking that his is the sort of thinking that ought to be fed into what is laughingly called the Department for Comedy and Science Fiction by those in the trade.

Phinn would scrap Ofsted and replace it with advisers working alongside teachers, give heads and teachers more autonomy over the curriculum and make parents more accountable for their kids’ behaviour.

Common sense? That’s too easy for the interfering departmental paper shufflers and for the various education ministers who seem to think new directives are obligatory if they are to make their mark before moving on to some other government department, leaving yet another fine mess in their wake.

HUMAN RIGHTS, BUT NOT FOR VICTIMS

A PAEDOPHILE plied two girls with drink and drugs then had sex with them. A judge described the offence as “truly shocking”.

So here’s a question. How much time do you think this vile person served in prison? Less than three years, that’s how long.

But the story gets worse. Instead of being deported to his native Pakistan, he appealed against the order and a tribunal said it would infringe his human rights because he has a wife and child in this country.

His rights? What about the rights of the children whose lives he might have ruined. The children at risk from future offending? Does anybody care about the rights of children any more? All sensible folk are in favour of human rights. But not when the upholding of human rights is interpreted as a charter for the evil and the malevolently clever to exploit our weakness.

There was another case last week where two paedophiles, one who raped a six-year-old boy, demanded their names be removed from the sex offenders’ register. One said it was preventing him taking a holiday abroad.

The Supreme Court ruled that keeping their names on the register for life was “disproportionate” and infringed their human rights. Are we now going to face a long stream of sex offenders appearing before panels of the learned and idiotic to discuss whether they have reformed and merit being turned loose in society without any checks?

I believe that the majority of sex offenders remain sex offenders for their active life. It is inevitable that some of these so-called reformed offenders who protest their human rights will go on to commit further outrages against vulnerable young people.

Then what about the human rights of the children who suffer at their hands? Given the choice between stopping a convicted sex offender’s holiday jollies and protecting children at risk I know which side of the human rights fence I sit on. It’s a case of human rights for everyone — except the victims.

DIBBING FOR VICTORY

AMAZING! That’s how someone described the success story of the modern Scouting movement to me the other day when we were discussing the record numbers of youngsters wanting to join.

Here we are in a health and safety world where kids are so often cocooned in their homes, sat before a computer or PlayStation or watching unsuitable TV programs. More and more parents work or are too lazy to entertain their offspring. Some fear that their kids are not safe out on the streets and in the parks where previous generations played blissfully and created their own adventure games.

And here we have the Scouts, with record rises in membership year on year and 33,000 kids itching to join if there were sufficient adult volunteers to enable them to do so.

So what does this say to us? It says that kids are not a lost cause. Thousands of youngsters are desperate for the opportunity to take part in physical adventure and learn those much maligned old life qualities like team work and taking personal responsibility.

There’s nothing old hat about the Scouting nowadays, what with abseiling, parascending and expeditions. The fact that so many youngsters want a part of the action isn’t so amazing after all.

TITTER YE NOT!

INSTEAD of looking for racism and bigotry where it

doesn’t exist, isn’t it time we lightened up a bit?

A Cockermouth barber has been condemned as a racist for displaying a statue of a black barber shop singer outside his premises. The gentleman concerned, who is incidentally of West African and Lebanese origin, does not sound much like a racist to me. But people are so ready to bristle with offence that they miss the real racism and bigotry in our society.

In Northallerton police seized a monster willy displayed in a shop window and threatened the owner with legal action in something right out of 1984. Ironically locals began a “free willy” campaign which seemed to put the whole thing in perspective.

This week a bunch of elderly jazz musicians calling themselves The Fabulous Shirtlifters were banned from playing at a National Trust bash because officials said the name had sexual connotations.

Perhaps life is so dreadful we have lost the gift of laughter and all sense of the ridiculous.