Oh dear, I’ve been hoping that this would all go away and we would come to our senses, but it seems that I’m going to have to get myself a certificate to prove I’m not a paedophile so that I can still visit schools.

Looking at the the ISA website I found the glaring loophole within thirty seconds.

Apparently, children in schools need protecting from children’s authors, who are accompanied at all times and work with groups of up to 300 at a time.

Those who actually want to harm children do not need to register – indeed it is in their interest not to. If they have a dodgy past they will become a barred person and then will break the law by entering Specific Places and carrying out Specific Activities. However, if they are not checked, they are free to enter private and domestic places and employment with impunity.

Where does 99% of all the damage to children occur? In the home of course, in domestic environments. So the overpaid, quango nonsense is powerless in the one place that real harm to children occurs. The scheme is nothing but a cash-raising enterprise – certainly in the case of visiting authors and those who would pass on their experience and expertise. It’s a tax on those who work with children. Sit back and watch as volunteers disappear. It is totally demeaning to go cap in hand to a faceless organisation and ask to be proved a nice person. Where will the youth workers, Arkelas and Brown Owls come from now?

And what message are we teaching our children? Everyone is a paedophile until proven innocent. This has turned the whole basis of our legal system upside down.

Watch the world of children and adults move further apart. Parents will soon be excluded from entering school premises. They pretty well are already, dropping their children off at the barbed wire security gates under the watchful eye of the surveillance camera. Parents only ever need to talk to schools through the gate intercom. No wonder they never turn up for parent’s evenings.

When do adults and children ever meet? How are children supposed to know what they are meant to grow up to be, if all the good people stay away from them in fear of being smeared. Children now are to be feared.

Who now would help a lost child? The irony is that most of us now would stand back and let a kidnapper take a child because we think we would be accused of something if we stepped in to help.

I was asked for a certificate a couple of years ago by a museum. I said I didn’t have one and didn’t see the point as I’d be on public show all day and all the children would be chaperoned by their parents. They hummed and hah-ed but in the end said okay. When I arrived, the two Gents toilets had been reassigned as one for Men and one for Boys! Nothing was said, but what message does that give? The organisers, of course, will come out with the usual guff about insurance and covering themselves, but what they were really saying is that all men and me in particular are a danger to boys, in particular. Notice that it was okay for women to take boys and girls into the toilets with them…

…Oh dear, didn’t we just have a case of arrests of a nursery nurse up to no good? Wasn’t she a woman? She would have been checked too. Fat lot of good that did! Anyone wanting to harm children will do so. Checks and laws won’t stop them. The laws will only create division in society. Except that children don’t count as society. They are just a nuisance that have to be put up with and hidden away until they are old enough to enter adult society.

I guess I’ll have to bite the bullet and pay – I’m fixed up to do loads of visits next year.

I’m not being a good blogger! All this came about from an article in Guardian. It’s great that Philip Pullman stand sup for us like this. Most children’s authors earn below the minimum wage from their writing, so school visiting is often the major part of their income. They will meekly sign up and be done with it.

I’m so used to being treated with suspicion in schools now that it comes as a surprise to be trusted. Last year I went to a school where I was met and showed around the school, visiting all the classes one by one, by two children. The school were so friendly and relaxed, that I mentioned it to them as being unusual. “But, you’re our honoured guest!” they said in surprise. “We invited you!”