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.

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.

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.

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...

Eric Tweedie reports back on a meeting of the British Aikido Board:

‘I attended a meeting in Warwickshire to discuss "the way forward" as regards the BAB future policy on Safeguarding. Several things have become clear:-
a/ Everyone is now completely fed up with regulation and governmental interference and there is now great resistance to anything further in this direction.
b/ Everyone now agrees that adults have become estranged from children evidenced by the fact that no-one is willing to touch a child in any way even to comfort them after a fall or injury.

This email from Mr M Parker is interesting, and very worrying. It shows how the refusal to comply with the child protection bureaucracy is taken as implied guilt. It also shows how ‘access to children’ is being taken in the broadest way possible, and including people who have no actual contact with, let alone responsibility for, children. The mere suggestion of a possibility of meeting a child is deemed enough…

This email comes from a pre-school professional, about the difficulties of taking photos of kids:

This post on a police chat forum shows that even the boys in blue aren’t above suspicion:

This email just came in, showing the way CRBs are affecting those who are doing most to help society’s most vulnerable:

The UK government has done a u-turn on carrying out criminal records checks on businesses that employ or train under-16s – following the publication of the Manifesto Club’s latest briefing document on the culture of vetting.