Scraping the barrel

Do I hear the sound of the bottom of the barrel being scraped?

The educational authorities have excelled themselves today. For sheer fatuousness, it's hard to beat the initiatives they've come up with today.

First up is the idea of retraining ex-soldiers as teachers. Now don't get me wrong, there's nothing wrong with soliders per se, but you can't help feeling that the mindset of the military man and the pedagogue may be ever so slightly different. I mean, aren't soldiers meant to, you know, kill people who disagree with them? Or at the very least punch their lights out.

Mind you, unarmed combat skills could be useful in some schools.

Secondly is the bizarre idea to make children sit "creativity tests". Needless to say, a whole bunch of quangos (QCA, Ofsted, Creative Partnerships etc, if you must ask) have been running amok in schools throughout the land, and are now breathlessly reciting all the ways they have dreamt up to further pad their already grossly enlarged budgets. The latest wheeze, worthy of a PhD in creativity at least, is that somebody needs to measure children's creativity. Because creativity, like motherhood, is a good thing. So if you're in school, there's a whole lot more testing coming your way soon.

Just remember folks, if you can't measure it, it doesn't exist.

I do just wonder though whether they think (a) this will make any difference to anything and (b) whether anyone is paying any attention anyway.