Very bad timing

There's bad timing, there's unfortunate timing and there's 'oh-my-god-why-did-they-say-that-now?' timing.

A sterling example of the latter with the yet another tedious, 'duh. really?' announcement from some pointless bunch of suits with nothing better to do.

According to the Children, Schools and Families Committee, school children are spending too much time in the classroom. The Committee criticised a lack of funding for trips and said children in poorer areas were less likely to go on them. Oh my - think of the chiiiiilldren, think of the pooooor.

The committee said there should be a 'requirement in the national curriculum' for at least one school visit a term and said this should be monitored in Ofsted inspections. Yeah, that's right: set a target, why don't you? Everybody loves a target.

Mick Brookes, general secretary of the National Association of Head Teachers joined in, pointing out that the benefits of school trips outweigh the safety fears.

"I think that people are over-anxious about this and the thing about taking children out is you change [your] relationships with them"

"You're no longer teaching maths and science - you're getting to know them."

But perhaps - just perhaps - today was not the best day to push that story. Not when yesterday, one school was so keen to send its kids on a trip, so eager to let them out of the classroom, that they set off into the teeth of a raging blizzard.

In conditions so poor that police had advised people not to travel. With the inevitable and tragic result that the bus went off a bridge, leaving scores of kids injured and one poor girl dead.

Not the best timing, really, is it?

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