THE latest round of huffing and puffing by politicians about so-called schools reform fails to impress me.
While Labour and the Tories are playing politics with education, children are emerging from Merseyside’s under-achieving and failing schools thicker and more yobbish with every year that passes.

Education experts, behavioural sociologists, useless teaching unions and hapless Government ministers have all had their say about what can be done about our barely literate subclass.
But the experts are getting it wrong. Again and again, they miss the point.
Now, I don’t know all the answers to the huge mess that is the education system, but I do have a plan, and here it is …
Let’s start with a frank assessment of reality. Many, though not all, teenagers emerge from the “care” of abysmal state schools and feckless parents into the dominant “I must please myself” culture of modern life.
These youths lack the internal moral compass that is vital for the living of a good and useful life. This is because youngsters are failing to get what preceding generations did receive – a solid moral training from Church, from schools and from parents in stable traditional families.
The Judaeo-Christian culture on which our nation is built took the Ten Commandments seriously as the moral rules for life and rightly so.
Nowadays, few young people could recite the Commandments, which is why they see nothing wrong with stealing, adultery, and all the other vices.
The rules governing morally upright behaviour are just as strong in Islam, of course, and I hope that the gradual increase in Muslim schools this country will do their job of passing on the rules of good behaviour and civic duty, though there is now a risk they will be infected by religious extremism and hatred of the West.
There are ways of bringing our young people back to a good and productive life, and they have nothing to do with the package of “partnerships”, admissions protocols, and “foundation” schools that the Government is struggling to push through Parliament.
Yes, education is the key to a better future, but the reforms we need are truly radical and will upset the teaching unions and other self-interest groups. So be it.
State education is in a pitiful state. Some three years ago I worked as a journalist in Hull, which officially had the worst performing schools in Britain. Even worse than Knowsley’s at the time. How bad is that?
I was appalled by the widespread inability of young people in Hull to express themselves in an intelligent way. Local teachers didn’t care for the criticism I directed toward them in print and wrote many letters of complaint about me. Those letters, tellingly, were littered with grave errors of spelling and grammar.
The first thing to tackle in schools is discipline, and to do that we must reintroduce an element of fear for young people (fear is, after all, the beginning of all wisdom).
That means bringing back corporal punishment.
No amount of excluding badly behaved pupils and placing them in “sin bin” pupil referral units or “cooler classes” can ever bring back discipline.
Here we come up against a very big problem. Caning, which was routinely used in British schools up to the early 1980s, was outlawed by several waves of domestic and European law, pushed through by liberal fundamentalists, and by the UN Convention on the Rights of the Child.
In order to bring back the cane, the UK would certainly have to withdraw from the European Union. That would be a messy process but it is legally feasible and in my view desirable for many reasons – so let’s do it. Let us be a nation once again.
Without good discipline, all tinkering with the curriculum will be largely ineffective but even so changes are needed in what is taught.
I suggest the following subjects should be obligatory in primary school: English, elementary mathematics, basic religion and moral rules, British history, geography, basic science and personal hygiene.
In secondary schools, I would add these compulsory subjects to the more common ones: personal finance; daily religious instruction (mainly Christian, Jewish or Muslim as appropriate, but including elements of all world faiths); cookery and domestic science for both boys and girls; philosophy (because we urgently need Britain’s young people to raise their intellectual game); and sex education, but based on the importance of marriage and fidelity, not the value-free sex “education” currently practised.
It’s a huge task, but if we can get schooling right Britain could again turn out eloquent young people who know the difference between right and wrong and can live good clean lives.
Then perhaps all the CCTV spy cameras, curfews, Acceptable Behaviour Agreements (ABAs) and Antisocial Behaviour Orders (ASBOs) and dispersal orders introduced in recent years to deal with all the wild young scallies would be unnecessary.

P.S. Now that I’ve got all that off my chest, let me tell you that I am far from being the stuffy, conservative moralist I might appear.
I like a drink or six, and I like to indulge in racy banter in pubs, particularly in the marvellous Hell’s Waiting Room in New Brighton.
I went in there for late doors last night. Almost the full posse was present in the front saloon. There was raucous laughter, saucy jokes, of course, and drinking and smoking. A scene of “Merrie Englande” if ever there was one.
I looked around at all the happy faces. Stella Feathercut tried to start a discussion with me about men’s liberation but I wasn’t having any of it.
The Bacardi Queen was all excited about plans for a birthday party to be held in the pub soon for her son and former husband.
The Cockerney Chappie thought it hilarious to taunt me again about the missing pies.
And we all decided we couldn’t be arsed to climb on the charabanc to go to the Irish club in Bootle for Patrick’s night. We would stay in Hell’s Waiting Room instead. Where we belong.
One fellow was a bit drunk and out of order last night, mind you, but the landlady Eleganta Chignon dealt with him efficiently.
The rest of us just enjoyed ourselves as usual. As Dixie the Jazzman puts it: “You’ve gorra ‘ave a giraffe, aven’t you?”
Fazackerley! I couldn’t agree more.

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