WE haven’t heard the last of this. Although the high court very sensibly agreed that John Platt was in his rights to take his daughter on holiday in term time – and quashed his £120 fine – the educational bureaucrats, the teaching unions and the Government aren’t going to let it end there. A spokesman for the Department of Education said: "We will look at the judgement in detail but we are clear that children's attendance is non-negotiable so we will now look to change the law."

So if at first the ball doesn’t go into the net, just move the goalposts.

No one has ever given me a satisfactory argument for making children’s schooling a matter for the government. Education in Britain was made compulsory back in the 19th Century – but why? I sympathise with those parents who take children out of school to go abroad, because accommodation prices can double in the holidays. But this argument goes far deeper than financial concerns. Over the last century the power of the state to intervene in our lives has grown monstrously. We are told what to eat, what to drink, how fat we can get and even how long we should sleep. While state-sponsored political correctness so restricts what we are permitted to say that free speech has been all but abolished.

We should tell the state to get out of our hair. The job of the Government is to defend us from foreign enemies and to keep the peace at home. Everything else is much better accomplished when it is done by private individuals and voluntary groups. Besides, they don’t actually care about children’s education – if they did, they would make sure it is not in such a lamentable condition. The Government’s own statistics tell us that 43 per cent of pupils leave school, after eleven years of full time education, unable to read, write and count efficiently.

Don’t look at GCSE papers, they will only make you weep. As a lifelong avid reader and a writer, it’s the English syllabus that most interests me. This has little to do with English language or literature and everything to do with the political fancies of state bureaucrats and lefty teachers. They’re all here, the usual suspects: Arthur Miller’s The Crucible, that sacred cow To Kill a Mocking Bird and the opening line of the first “poem” the children are asked to analyse is: “Although you have given me a stomach upset.” But that paper gave me a pain in a different part of my anatomy.

This is not English but political propaganda. All the teachers’ fashionable obsessions are here. “How does J.B. Priestley present ideas about equality?” Drugs, cosmetics and animal testing. “Is it acceptable to use animals for entertainment and to improve our health?” And, “Describe the UN plan to eliminate child labour”. I should like to set a question: “Show how state education in Britain amounts to cruelty to children.” Next question in that English paper begins: “Go on admit it, you love cheap clothes but don’t care about child labour.” Followed by: “We should care more about young people suffering in poor parts of the world.”

I glanced next at the GCSE music syllabus and discovered that only a quarter of it need be devoted to “the European classical tradition from 1650”. But the European classical tradition from 1650 IS music! This paper begins by asking the pupils to listen to something called “I’m gonna be 500 miles” by The Proclaimers.

I chucked the lot and read a few pages of Jane Eyre to clear my head.