ARE your kids back at school yet? Or are they still in their rooms tapping away at a screen?
Just a heads up here — they were meant to be back at least a week ago.
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So maybe chivvy them along a little.
It’s becoming a real problem, actually.
More and more children aren’t bothering to go to school.
In a study last year, the Centre for Social Justice reckoned 142,487 kids missed a HALF OR MORE of all their lessons over a year.
And 20 per cent of kids miss at least an afternoon per week.
How has this happened?
OK, there were plenty of children playing truant back in my day.
You’d spend the hours smoking and maybe smashing something up.
And gloating over the fact you weren’t in double maths.
But it’s got much more serious.
In a way it would be better if the kids were out smashing something up.
But by and large they are not.
Instead they are at home with depression or anxiety.
Or some similarly related mental condition, which didn’t exist when I was a kid.
Another survey, by The Children’s Society, found that 15-year-old British girls showed the heaviest decline in reported “happiness” of any country in Europe.
There is a whole bunch of reasons why we’re in this position.
One of them, obviously, is Covid.
That wretched virus — or more properly our terrible over-reaction to it — meant that kids missed the best part of a year’s education.
They got used to not being at school. The behaviour becomes ingrained.
At the same time, a lot of the parents were on furlough — being paid for doing nowt.
Many people found this an extremely attractive innovation and still haven’t gone back to work, even now.
There are 9.2million people of working age in the UK who are not working or looking for work.
That’s 700,000 more than before Covid.
Staying at home, then, can get to be a family habit.
But there’s also the increased diagnoses of mental health illnesses.
Frankly, if your kids ARE in school, they might be in the school’s “wellbeing centre”, which are reliably full everywhere.
This is the place the children go when they are feeling depressed or anxious.
And there are many more staff to deal with them than was ever the case before.
I do think that our children are a bit over-indulged in this department.
I’m not saying that they should all be told to snap out of it.
Although I’m tempted to.
But a degree of investigation wouldn’t go amiss, rather than just taking an adolescent’s word for it.
But then many are made anxious by social media.
We know that for a fact.
Social media is a pernicious influence on our kids, and the sooner we ban the under-16s from having open access to the internet, the happier those kids will be in the end.
So there you have it, a complex matter which the Government seems determined to do nothing about.
Because banning smartphones and getting a little less tolerant with malingerers isn’t an easy thing for governments to do.
But it is the right thing to do.
Kids who stay off school will — sure as eggs is eggs — develop into adults who stay home all day.
It is crucial for our society that we nip this in the bud, then.
Get the kids back in schools.
And not in the wellbeing centres, but in the classroom, learning stuff again.
Who’s a good them?
A LESBIAN social worker who described her colleague’s “gender fluid” dog as a “boy” was disciplined by her employers.
The dog is a dachshund called Pablo.
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It is forced by its owner to wear a tutu and take part in LGBTQI+ parades.
But now a tribunal has awarded the lesbian £55,000, plus £8,000 in legal costs, after she was banned from contacting members of an LGBTQ group or attending meetings.
This all happened inside Cambridgeshire County Council.
And one assumes it will be the people of Cambridgeshire who pay for that compensation.
Rather than the stupid council employees.
Mind you, serves them right for living there, I suppose.
If you live there, get the hell out and move to somewhere this stuff doesn’t happen, i.e not Brighton or Oxford.
Or London.
Or . . . oh God, what’s the point any more?
Word wars
TRAINEE lawyers have been warned against using the term “falling on deaf ears”.
This is in case it offends people who are hard of hearing, apparently.
I just hope that in whatever fatuous seminar this advice is imparted, all the students are suddenly struck by the most appalling tinnitus which prevents them from hearing such guff.
Press ahead, Israel
THE Israeli pager detonations cheered me up no end.
Suddenly, at precisely the same time, bang!
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Thousands of members of Hezbollah found their gonads had been rapidly transported to a different part of the planet.
All co-ordinated by some Mossad agent pressing a button.
Yesterday there was more – bombs in walkie- talkies this time.
Hezbollah is a vicious Islamist terrorist organisation sponsored by Iran.
The more of them removed from circulation the better.
Hezbollah vows revenge – good luck with that.
The Israelis easily have their measure.
Battle of ‘Witt
MARTIN HEWITT is the UK’s new border chief.
He was appointed by Sir Keir Starmer.
His job is to try to stop the economic migrants arriving here in boats from Calais.
He has just said that tackling the people traffickers will not be enough to stop the numbers coming here.
Given that this is Labour’s only stated policy, looks like those numbers will be rising and rising.
Tay-king the mick
HE likes his freebies, Sir Keir, doesn’t he? Not remotely different to the Tories, is he?
It’s now been discovered that Starmer’s missus received two free tickets to the Taylor Swift gigs in the UK.
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Why?
More worryingly to me is the fact that almost half the bloody Cabinet was at the shows.
Including Wes Streeting and Bridget Phillipson.
Is that really their idea of culture?
Listening to the middle- of-the-road caterwauling from a boring plastic moppet?
Get a grip, Robin
THE, ahem, comedian Robin Ince has accused Ricky Gervais of “bullying” him when they were on a tour.
Apparently Ricky made a few jokes at Robin’s expense.
And Robin claims he then came out in red lumps all over his body.
Through stress, you see.
I’m not sure I swallow all this.
I suspect Ince is attacking Gervais in public because he doesn’t agree with his politics.
Ince is yet another woke public schoolboy much beloved by the BBC.
The kind of comedian the BBC adores – one who never says anything funny.
Edwards’ life is destroyed. . . but
where’s the Beeb apology to The Sun?
I DON’T have much of a problem with Huw Edwards’ suspended sentence.
If you are worried the former BBC newsreader has not received sufficient punishment – remember his entire life has been destroyed.
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Yes, compared to some other crimes it seems lenient.
But that’s the way our courts have been going – they are too open to political interference.
That’s a scandal, but Edwards is not really anything to do with it.
The problem now is for the BBC.
Director-General Tim Davie has got to sort out the corporation’s useless, self-serving complaints department.
And an apology to The Sun wouldn’t go amiss, either.