Education, education, education – it's clearly wasted on the young

Shall we just not bother with school any more, eh? asks Victoria Coren
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Walibi World is a gloomy place in October. The park is dark and quiet, the staff are depressed, the water rides are freezing. Visitors may not quite get the full, joyful experience promised by its website, in what reads like a beautifully direct translation of the original Flemish: "The more than 40 attractions will guarantee an unforgettable experience. Plenty of splashing is guaranteed in the unique Splash Battle and El Rio Grande! Will you manage to stay dry in one of these adventures? (Some of the attractions cannot be used by people who are very tall or very large)."

I was neither very tall nor very large when I went to Walibi. I was probably about 12 years old. Despite the cold water, purple clouds and cold, purple staff, I had one of the greatest afternoons of my life. I was never allowed to go to the fair at home. I'm not sure why; I think my parents imagined shoddy, ill-fixed rides thrown up overnight by itinerant, tattooed pickpockets. (I say "imagined"…)

But the host family for my French exchange – Florence and her parents, an elegant pair of Belgian chocolatiers – were more open-minded about the amusement park experience. I found that strange, since they were far less open-minded about everything else. They told me off, most sternly, for talking to a "common boy" on the bus.

They were terrifyingly posh, those chocolate millionaires. They had a carriage drive and Florence's mother wore diamonds in the daytime.

I arrived in Flevoland with a traditional English thank you present that my own mother had insisted I pack: a Mr Kipling Manor House cake. I took it from my suitcase in its battered little cardboard box and handed it over. Florence's mother examined it from a squeamish distance, as if I had unearthed the gift of an ancient kipper. She extracted it from the wrapping with some reluctance and put it on the tea table.

I still remember looking at that small, cheap, crumbly cake, lost and alone amid the glossy, handmade patisseries, and empathising with it hugely.

Under new rules, to be brought in next November, that cake would never have made it to Flevoland. Schoolchildren will go on no more foreign exchanges, ministers have ruled, unless both parents on the British side submit to full child protection checks.

If paedophiliaphobia has reached the concept of the foreign exchange, however many forms are filled in, I can't help suspecting that no more kids will be dispatched alone to Belgium.

"Belgium,!" the child protection officers will shriek. "You might just as well drape a rabbit in a chicken skin, pop a boiled egg in its mouth and send it to a fox convention!"

Obviously, one wants children to be safe. Unfortunately, this new policy has at its heart (as do so many government initiatives, especially on education) an enormous logical flaw.

The penalty for failing to sign up to the Independent Safeguarding Authority before planning an exchange will be a fine of £5,000. Let's just think about that.

Those who submit to the checks will do so because they know there is nothing dodgy to be found, so that's an enormous waste of everybody's time and paperwork.

Those who swerve the procedure will divide into two groups. The first group will be parents who would sooner saw their own arms off than hurt a child, but are forgetful or busy or simply unaware of the new policy – or who deliberately ignore it because they feel uneasy about "submitting to full checks" as though they were trying to get across Nazi Germany by train. These people should really not be fined £5,000 for trying to give their kids a bit of an adventure and some grounding in a foreign language.

The second group will be convicted paedophiles who do not want their records to be unearthed, thus scuppering their brilliant schemes to procure small, foreign victims for abuse or to swap their own hapless children with like-minded monsters from over the border. For these people, I'm not convinced that a penalty of £5,000 truly covers the problem.

There are literally no circumstances under which the £5,000 fine could possibly be appropriate. It's cruel and unnecessary for people who do not plan ill and absurdly underpowered for those who do.

Yes, it's another of those laws that will cause headaches, time-wasting, queasy Big Brother scrutiny and undeserved fines for the innocent of heart, while doing absolutely bugger all to protect us from the guilty.

Most likely, these stringent new rules and their arduous, off-putting forms will bring an end to foreign exchanges, a practice that spread after the Second World War in a heart-warming spirit of building bridges between nations and promoting cultural understanding. But never mind all that. It can just be another thing that children aren't allowed to do.

A couple of weeks ago, we heard from David Phillips, emeritus professor at Imperial College London, that schoolchildren don't do chemistry experiments any more. You can't let modern kids go dropping sodium into water or setting fire to magnesium ribbon, not if health and safety officials have anything to do with it.

They're not allowed to do contact sport in case they hurt themselves. They're not allowed to take difficult exams in case they fail.

It invites the question: shall we just not bother with school any more, eh? Let's certainly not bother with teachers. There's no point training all those bright young men and women just to watch children slumped in padded armchairs texting each other.

There was controversy last week when it was revealed that two councils in east London have directed schools to close for Hindu, Muslim and Sikh holidays as well as Easter and Christmas. People say it is "political correctness gone mad". I say it's an excellent start. Now to close schools every other day as well and send a generation of bored, fat, little souls to work.

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