One thing is certin: discipline will not be established in Britain’s classrooms by cheap electioneering Pull your socks up, Ms Kelly.. That leaves the door open to rehabilitation.These plans are much more attractive than the Conservatives’ proposals to give head teachers complete control over exclusions and to abolish the independent appeals process. This would result in an explosion in the number of pupils outside the mainstream education sector. While the Government’s pupil referral units, for children with severe behavioural problems, have improved in recent years, flooding them with thousands more children in a short space of time, as the Tories propose, would be folly.Where the Education Secretary let herself down was in talking of a “zero tolerance approach” – an attempt, no doubt, to sound just as hard-line as the Tories on this issue. In some instances, it is simply impossible to avoid excluding a pupil In others, an accommodation can be reached Much depends on the nature of the school. It is clear, however, that exclusion is still used too frequently because of pressure on schools exerted by the Department for Education’s league tables – yet another unwelcome by-product of the Government’s obsession with targets and tables.
It is also clear that politicians offering “tough rhetoric” and easy solutions to the problem of discipline in schools, particularly in the run-up to a general election, should be treated with immense suspicion. One child can seriously disrupt the education of a whole classroom.

It seems reasonable, too, to take particularly disruptive pupils out of certain lessons, but, if possible, not to expel them. Ruth Kelly, the Education Secretary, strayed into this category yesterday.The proposals she outlined to shore up discipline were sensible enough. It is right that Ofsted inspectors should pay particular attention to the effectiveness of schools in dealing with badly behaved pupils. There is no simple answer to the question of how schools should deal with disruptive pupils. In the growing litany of scare stories about global warming, one of the most sobering came yesterday from the British Antarctic Survey. According to the survey’s latest findings, the West Antarctic ice sheet, for decades assumed to be stable, may be beginning to disintegrate, threatening a catastrophic rise in sea levels this century.

Of course, the scientists cannot be absolutely certain that the signs of melting they now see are not an aberration. But if the Government can say it had to act on the slimmest of evidence of WMD, how much less reason for delaying action now against the far more serious potential threat of global warming.. Nobody thinks that a weather vane is unsightly, so you might as well go the whole hog and install a row of small windmills along the top of your church. In fact, call it an art installation, and you will get sackloads of lottery money for it.HOW CAN I ERECT A SMALL WIND FARM ON TOP OF A CHURCH ?This requires a whole article to itself.Next week, the dos and don’ts of installing a wind farm – or indeed roof garden, paddling pool or helicopter pad – on top of a church..

Therefore, rather than any of those three, I would go for a small private generator powered by a wind farm.WHERE SHALL I PUT THE WIND FARM?On top of the church, of course, you idiot. Teams of small boys manning handles behind the organ, in a convenient space where they can also smoke unseen and play video games.WHICH IS THE RIGHT METHOD FOR ME?Teams of small boys are not only a standing temptation to vicars, but are also notoriously unreliable So are steam and mains electricity. Only in Britain: the rates in the Caribbean are the same as for white British people.Sometimes conspiracy theories are true, as in the extraordinary tale of the Ukraine elections; sometimes they are funny, and I was amused by the Millionaire one. But often they are dangerous and damaging; who knows what “explanations” are being passed around Iraq relating to the Western-sponsored elections?Invariably, a firm belief in such things indicates a psychological helplessness; a feeling that you yourself can make no difference. You can’t win a quiz show; you may be confined through artificially-induced schizophrenia; all elections resemble Ukraine’s. We should pay attention to conspiracy theories; even though they rarely come true, their prevalence says something worrying about how people see their lives, their chances.. How far can you trust the markets to deliver the right results? It is the great question facing not just this government but governments the world over.

Here in the UK it is part of the divide between Tony and Gordon, for the Prime Minister’s instinct is to trust market signals, while the Chancellor’s is to trust a centrally-administered policy, subsequently audited to make sure it gives value for money But that is our worm’s-eye view of a global debate. Just about every government is wrestling with the difficulty of delivering public services in a world where people have become accustomed to ever-greater choice. The private sector uses the markets not just to discover what people really want; it also uses them to squeeze down the resources needed to provide it. Church organ music has got a reputation for being impressionistic, that is, sloppy, messy and full of runny colours.