Fight for a good school is making criminals of parents

"Some of the operational aspects are ludicrous and completely outrageous and I think we all need protecting from the way local authorities are using Ripa. This is about saying 'no more'," said Paton.

Late last week it was announced that reforms were afoot, which mean junior council officials will no longer be able to authorise surveillance on behalf of local authorities, though Ripa's use will be extended when it comes to tracing parents who won't pay child support.

The latter is fair enough; the idea that the former existed at all is just hilarious - junior executives authorising snoopage (you can just picture the self-importance) as though they were MI5 tailing Anthony Blunt, rather than a bunch of Asda suits chasing some random dog-owner, or someone who had put their wheelie bin out on the wrong day. Or some woman trying to get her kids into her local school.

It just shows you, though, how vexed the question of choosing a school for your child has become (and how creepily we're all being watched, all the time, without our knowledge. And how councils that can't even get it together to replace your recycling bags have alarming powers).

If people didn't feel obliged to lie about their addresses or their commitment to religion - Dr Ian Craig, the schools adjudicator, said last week that an estimated 3,500 people lied to get their children into the school of their choice - there would be no need for Ripa to be misused.

Craig, in a government-commissioned report, called the dishonest acquiring of school places a form of "theft" - because it deprived a genuinely local child of a place - and pointed out that parents who lied had "nothing to lose" if they were caught.

There is a simple and obvious solution to this, because the problem isn't a shortage of schools but a shortage of good ones with a decent social mix: in London at least, some state schools are middle-class ghettos (populated by parents who constantly congratulate themselves, both privately and in public, on their magnificent sense of social responsibility in sending their kids to their local state school, without mentioning that if it is made up of the children of publishers, lawyers, politicians and doctors, it's hardly representative of the system as a whole).

It seems kind of crashingly obvious that if there was no choice - if you lived in area A and had to send your child to school A, without the options of schools B, C, and D - then the social mix would improve dramatically, nowhere would become any kind of ghetto, and all those eager-beaver middle-class parents could colonise the school associations and the governors' board and instil the kinds of improvements that would be welcomed by everyone.

If only it were that simple. Even those most ideologically opposed to the idea of "privilege" are capable of performing the most extraordinary U-turns when it comes to their children's education.

I've had children at (state and private) school for 12 years now, and the amount of nonsense you come across - regarding both private and state schools - is simply incredible.

The supposedly diehard lefties with the children at private school never say, "Yes, massive ideological U-turn, bit embarrassing, but there you go." Instead they wriggle about trying to think up excuses that fool nobody - X is "very creative" or "gifted" or "sensitive" or has mild learning difficulties, which usually means they're a bit slow at spelling.

Somebody once told me, with a straight face, that they were sending their child to a massively expensive fee-paying school because it was best to "fight inequality from within" and "know the enemy". The preferred line is that it is simply impossible to get a place at your school of choice - though if you really believed in equality of education, surely you wouldn't have a school of choice?

Having said that, I am equally irritated by middle-class people making a virtue of sending their kids to state schools, as though they were brave pioneers. Applying the same logic to, say, food - "Oh yes, we eat potatoes, just like our brethren the common people" - would mark you out as a mad person, and yet it is considered acceptable to talk about sending your middle-class child to an inner-city state school as though you were some kind of martyr.

The whole thing is a mess, though you can hardly blame parents for wanting the best education possible for their children. Wanting your children to enjoy their school days, and to be taught well, is hardly a crime. It is being treated like one only because of the hoops parents are expected to jump through.

Remove the hoops and you remove the problem. My friend who has pretended to be a Catholic for 10 years because she didn't want to send her kids to a school where a lot of children carry knives wouldn't be the only one to feel greatly relieved. As things stand, she's probably under the sofa hiding from her local council and their Ripa superpowers.

+ An American study of 34 playgroups with children aged between three and six found that parents' love of dressing up their children in designer clothes adversely affected the ability to play. Expensive outfits were "not to be ruined" by running about outside or rough play, which meant children were reluctant to go outside and care workers wary of sending them; inappropriate footwear, such as flip-flops, impeded running about, and so on.

In the week that Stella McCartney's (lovely) collection of children'swear for Gap hits the shelves, the findings of Dr Kristen Copeland - she is a child health researcher at Cincinnati children's hospital medical centre - are worth bearing in mind. Dressing children up as though they are little dollies is sometimes overwhelmingly tempting, but there's a great deal to be said for hand-me-downs and clothes that don't break easily.

Put your child in anything that reads "dry-clean only" with care, unless you like the idea of them staring mournfully out of the window while everyone else rolls about gleefully in the mud.