BALLS! DON'T LET THE NUTTERS TAKE OVER OUR SCHOOLS

So the Government has warned more than 600 secondary schools that unless they improve they will be closed down or be replaced by privately-backed academies.

I beg your pardon, Mr Balls!? That’s not our old friend Loada, but Ed Balls, the Education Secretary who set out the so-called £400million National Challenge to save under-achieving schools.

This from a government that believes inflation is running at around three per cent! This from a government that believes we can’t add up the rising cost of food and fuel to work out that the basic cost-of-living inflation (and stuff the price of CDs and new trackies) is at least six per cent. Milk went up again this week – which not only surprised a few cows but also added another worry to the pile already sitting on the shoulders of our poorest pensioners.

The trouble is, if we handed the problem over to the Tories they would hand the problem over to private finance anyway and pocket the change. Ooh – whoops a daisy, what am I saying!?

Perhaps we could get the most successful organisation in the UK to run our schools – that’s right, Tesco. That would at least sort out the economics of it. But then again, future generations truly would know the price of everything and the value of nothing. Roll up and get two nothings for the price of one!

The real problem with privately-backed schools is that any megalomaniac magnate can ‘buy’ himself a school and install equally nutty teachers.

Don’t believe me? Do some research on Emmanuel College in Gateshead – a collaboration between the Tony Blair administration and used car salesman Sir Peter Vardy. The ignoble knight doled out a paltry £2million so he could share his personal religious convictions with the region’s children – brainwash them into believing his ludicrous version of creationism.

‘Yes, God really did create the earth in seven days – and that was only a few thousand years ago. And never mind Darwin and evolution and the geology of fossils and all the other so-called evidence – the world’s experts are wrong and we are right.’

Or words to that effect.

That is the real danger, Ed. Don’t balls it up for our kids.