As a parent of two primary school age children (years 2 and 5), I have to plead guilty to being a rubbish parent when it comes to organising homework. My 6 year old gets two books a week to read at home with a parent, plus spellings to learn. My eldest is supposed to read in her own time and keep notes of what she has read, do a set of maths homework, spellings, and project work in her log book. It might not sound like a huge amount, but combine that with my work schedule, the kids wanting to go to friends houses or have friends round to play, or after school clubs, and having to eat and sleep at some point, and homework can simply become the last straw.

I’m all for parents being involved with the education of their children, but homework at primary school is often the cause of endless arguments and guilty consciences. Children need to have some “downtime” when they come out of school. A lot of the time the quality of the homework is so rushed and “last minute” that they don’t absorb any real learning from it anyway, or the parents end up spoonfeeding them the answers. In year 6 maybe they should have some introduced to get them used to the concept of independent work at home, but before then, I’m not convinced that there is any real benefit in children having homework at all. The school day is long and demanding, especially for the younger ones, and to try to squeeze in homework in the evening is the last thing that most families want to do.

Ed Balls is ordering a “study” into whether teachers who are members of the British National Party should be allowed to work in schools. “I have always believed that membership of any organisation that espouses racist views is fundamentally incompatible with the values and ethos of the teaching profession,” the Schools Secretary has said. It’s a tricky one this. Are we saying that regardless of party membership, people who hold racist views should not be allowed to be teachers? Does it imply that there is otherwise no such thing as a racist teacher? I was at secondary school in the 1980’s, and have just about managed to blot out the memory of a history teacher who used the words “darkies” and “coloureds” in his lessons on the American civil rights movement. But then there was the RE teacher who believed that AIDS was God’s punishment for homosexuals. Are these the only examples of teachers letting their personal beliefs sneak into their teaching? Probably not. I reacted at the time with suitable teenage outrage, but there were other students who would have agreed with these teachers beliefs, and there may have been other students who were gay or lesbian in the class who would have felt mortified. There weren’t any black or Asian students in my history class, which doubtless gave the horrible history teacher a sense of security that his bigoted views would go unchallenged.

I think as a principle, people who are card-carrying members of the BNP should not be allowed to teach, because obviously, if you believe that people “…whose ancestors were the earliest settlers here (in Britain) after the last great Ice Age “ (this is taken from the BNP mission statement) have some kind of precedence over people of other nationalities or ethnic backgrounds, you are slightly mental. I’m all for teachers who are mental in a creative, dynamic, subject-obsessed way, but I draw the line at teachers who believe that it is possible to identify (down to the individual) people who are directly descended from whoever the random migrants were who happened to be wandering around what has become the British Isles thousands of years later.

The BNP education policy also lacks a certain detail which is regrettable. Anyone fancy devising a curriculum made up of “old-fashioned literacy skills”, “old-fashioned mathematics skills”, “a full curriculum of British history” (what, all of it?) “the restoration of discipline – including corporal punishment “ and the “re-introduction of competitive sports”? So have competitive sports been banned from schools? What do they mean by “old fashioned” skills in literacy and numeracy? Will they be giving every classroom an abacus?

Being based in Yorkshire, I’m none too proud to have Andrew Bron as an MEP representing my region in the European parliament. He has been a teacher at a college in Harrogate for 40 years teaching politics and law. It is doubtful that he has produced legions of students who have been brainwashed into thinking as he does about the world – thank God for the National Curriculum. Any good teacher will keep their own personal beliefs out of the classroom, and instead focus on making their students into individuals who question ideas, and develop their own conclusions based on a wide variety of resources and opinions. Ed Balls can commission his study, but banning BNP teachers from teaching may only serve to make them into martyrs, and to lie about their political persuasions. As a gesture it sends out the right signals (ie racism isn’t acceptable in public sector settings), but in reality it may well backfire.