FOR years of hard work and dedication, teachers are normally rewarded by having assembly halls named after them, says The Times Educational Supplement (Jan 13). Not so Jennifer Higham, who counts the former jockey Peter Scudamore among her ex-pupils. When a name was needed for a new racehorse stabled at Scudamore’s yard there was an obvious choice. “And the cry, ‘Mrs Higham is coming up on the outside’ , gave pleasure all round,” says the TES. For the record, Mrs Higham finished fifth in her first outing.
Another inspirational female figure features in Planning (Jan 13), which reports that Marge Simpson, the blue-haired, beehived matriarch of cartoon fame, has been enlisted by anti-tram campaigners in Edinburgh. An episode of The Simpsons focused on Marge’s battle against a proposed monorail for her home town of Springfield: a smooth-talking salesman makes a convincing case for the scheme but holds back some disturbing secrets that could derail it. Edinburgh’s anti-trammers say that the plot mirrors the one unfolding in their own city. But the council-owned company running the scheme says that it is “building a first-class network for Edinburgh, not Springfield”. Which is not a real place, in case there should be any doubt.
In Devon, meanwhile, council staff have resorted to crash-helmets to protect themselves from aggressive residents. Local Government First (Jan 7) says that workers trying to collect weather data from the roof of a council building have been dive-bombed by seagulls. “It is very distressing, but at least we now have crash helmets to protect us from being pecked about the head,” one victim says.
Being pecked about the head sounds like a good reason for some sick leave, but it would take a lot of head-pecking to account for the levels of sickness absence among Bradford Council staff. The council is to review the way it manages sickness after it emerged that total sick leave among its 19,800 staff equated to 700 years off work last year. Personnel Today (Jan 10) says that each staff member took an average of 13 days’ sick leave, which adds up to a whopping 257,400 working days. The figure is actually an improvement on the previous year, when staff were, on average, off sick for 14.2 days each.
It’s back to the TES for news of state-sanctioned pre-emptive sickies. German schoolchildren in Kaiserslautern will be allowed to stay home on match days during the World Cup to “protect them from violence”. Don’t they have crash helmets?