This blog is a (much!) less-than-formal outlining of recent travels, events, happenings, thoughts and comments which tend to have some occupational relevance, but are on occasion nothing more than a means of passing the time while waiting for trains, planes & automobiles...

Sunday, 7 July 2013

Half-baked Breakfast Plan

I've just returned from three days  external examining in Belfast, where the lead story in Thursday's local paper was about the new president of the Faculty of Public Health describing his plan to prevent parents from driving their children to the school gates. Apparently, Professor John Ashton thinks that childhood obesity can be tackled by forcing pupils to walk a couple of hundred yards each day.
He says that
"One of the things we really should be doing is strictly prohibiting cars stopping outside school to drop kids off but have drop-off points, if at all, a few hundred yards away so at least the children get to walk a quarter of a mile each day from the dropping-off point ... it would make a difference."
Now it isn't that I think the sentiment is wrong, after all surely any exercise is better than nothing, but the removal of parental choice surely is. Pr Ashton's bullying tone is nothing to do with suggestions or recommendations, it's entry-level fascism. "Strictly prohibited" applies to all parents; not just those who haven't the sense to work out a food/fresh air ratio, or realise that maybe fried/fast food leads to little Johny/Jane/Jamal turning into something not-so-little around the middle.

This will doubtless lead to parents either risking the legion of ticket-happy goons waiting to enforce this directive on any car that dawdles by the school gates, or allow teenage art projects than have taken weeks to prepare getting ruined by a rain storm or blown apart in a gale. And for those who play sport, there's now the disincentive of lugging a cricket/hockey/football/rugby/etc bag an extra half-mile a day in addition to their school books!

Pr Ashton doesn't appear to have thought this though, but if he's the "UK's leading public health expert", what sort of alternative plan would those less qualified have come up with?

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