Tickled Pink

”’MISS!” Yes, little Johnny. ”What’s an exam, miss?”

”The cat BLANK on the mat? Hmm…”

If Charles Clarke, the bat-eared Education Secretary has his way that’s the only kind of questions you’ll hear in our primary schools.

In what the Sun calls a U-turn, the Mail a ”surrender”, and the Mirror an example of how this Government learns from its mistakes, the news is that SATs are to end.

Those Government-set targets that say children should be able to read and write to a prescribed level by the time they’re 11 are to be scrapped.

Instead, all that children of an impressionable age will have to do at school is repeat the phrase ”I love Tony, for he is good” over and over until they sound like they mean it.

Anyone failing to perform this simple, yet effective, task in citizenship will be sat in the specially adapted bus, a picture of which appears in the Mail.

The school bus, which is being piloted on the Isle of Wight, is bright pink and has no heating, despite the windows always being open.

Nicknamed the ”Pink Peril”, the single-decker bus is said to have been highly effective in ”taming” badly behaving nine to 16-year-olds.

Niki Haytack, crime and disorder manager for the Isle of Wight Council, tells us how it works.

”When troublemakers have been given a taste of the pink medicine, they don’t want a second dose,” she says.

”They are known to be embarrassed and to hide their faces on the journey…It is so uncool.”

But, as Charles Clarke has just asked, ”Miss, what’s embarrassed mean?”

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Posted: 20th, May 2003 | In: Tabloids Comment | TrackBack | Permalink