The sight and sound of children playing could be delightful or irritating, depending on your point of view. Yet now a school has blocked a planning application for new flats in Hornsey, north London, on the basis that the flats’ balconies will overlook a children’s playground. Chairman of the school governors said that these properties overlooking the playground could be bait to paeodphiles. ‘We’ve all read of cases where there have been examples of parents, families, fathers who are involved with child pornography regardless of whether they have got their own children or not. It’s not acceptable’, he said. The chairman conjured…

Being a children’s author was once a charming career, building mysterious worlds of fantasy trees and secret adventures. Yet children’s authors do meet a lot of children: they do readings with children, they get letters from children; they are admired by children. And this, according to Ofsted, makes them a potential risk. Before, Ofsted decided that children’s authors did not need a CRB check, but that they should not be left alone with children when they visited schools. Now the organisation has decided that they do need to be checked, even if they are supervised, ‘because there is a chance for authors…

This email from John Kirkby shows the murky dealings with the Criminal Records Bureau bureaucracy… ‘Last year, the London borough of Kensington & Chelsea discovered a “problem” with my CRB disclosure evidence. Around the same time my credit card had been fraudulently used and I’ve always assumed there was some connection between the two events. On contacting the CRB department, my enquiries were set aside by claims that my questions could not be answered for data protection reasons…in the meantime the police had contacted me requesting fingerprints & photos. ’The long & short of the matter was that my “problem case” was…

On the light side, this is a funny take on the tooth fairy. It would be funny, were it not so close to the bone… ‘Children losing teeth will find no money under their pillows for many weeks as the government has ordered the tooth fairy to undergo police background checks before she can continue working with children. “Employees of all government funded organisations have to undergo CRB (Criminal Records Bureau) checks before they can work with vulnerable members of society,” explained police chief Sir Ian Blair before reminding us that the tooth fairy in funded with tax payers money. Although the…