Child Detention

Last week, after Ed Balls’s decision to appoint Maggie Atkinson, the director of children’s services for Gateshead Council, to the post of Children’s Commissioner for England, which prompted allegations that the Schools Secretary was a “bully”, Stephen Pollard, the editor of the Jewish Chronicle, complained in this newspaper that we were witnessing “an argument over an appointment to a job no one has ever heard of, no one cares about and no one wants”.

Pollard continued in this ranty vein, arguing that there was no need for a children’s commissioner “to promote the views of children and young people from birth to 18” because the human race had managed to exist for more than half a million years without one, and that the pointlessness of the post was evident in the fact that Sir Al Aynsley-Green, the current Children’s Commissioner for England, warned, at the height of the furore over teenage knife crime last year, that allowing police to search children for knives might antagonise them.

The piece annoyed me in two ways. First, if you follow Pollard’s logic that children can look after themselves, you could argue for the abolition of government support for social services, a number of education departments and any number of children’s organisations. Maybe he thinks that the work that Ofsted does in monitoring children’s homes, many NSPCC campaigns, the announcement yesterday that schoolchildren will be given more intensive careers advice, and the launch by Barnardo’s, also today, of a website for teenagers to express their concerns (http://theteensspeech.org.uk/), are also a waste of time?

Second, it was mean of Pollard to quote only one of Sir Al’s (more banal) pronouncements as Children’s Commissioner for England…

Read atTimes Online