This is Ed Balls, Schools Secretary in the current UK government. Ed just announced his Ten Year Plan for the country's children, a cornucopia of ideas to tackle anti-social behaviour and barriers to learning. He proposes a streamlined curriculum, fine-tuned testing (when the child is ready and not before) and convenient on-site services. These would include social workers, child psychologists and police officers. The police would be there to provide positive role models so presumably they wouldn't be issued with anything useful, like cuffs or tranquillizer darts.

I don't imagine Ed Balls is a stupid man, and he has three children of his own so we can't blame inexperience. So how can he and his advisors have gotten this so pathetically wrong? Why didn't he call me?

Barriers to learning? Well here are three just to get us started.

1. Low expectations.
2. A ubiquitously dumb, vulgar and pervasive pop culture.
3. A society that derides intellectual achievement.

Ask any speccy-four-eyed kid trying to bury himself in a library.

Shall we move on to anti-social behaviour? Dare we mention the elephant in the room? Do let's.
Children never used to disrupt classrooms, terrorize neighbourhoods and destroy lives because they feared the consequences. Which were,

1. The disapproval of others.
2. A sense of personal shame.
3. A good hiding.

I could almost have laughed at Ed's Ten Year Plan but tears of frustration got the better of me. My grandchildren are aboard his idiotic runaway train. Actually, they may well be sitting on a pile of old reading primers and driving it.
God help us all.