This week: Lynette Burrows

Last week saw a major new entry in the pantheon of stupid, offensive and ignorant suggestions made about teachers by amateur “commentators”. This one is right up there with the best. If you have even the smallest blip on your blood-pressure chart, TES strongly recommends that you read no further.

This is an extraordinary tale of stinging vitriol that is perhaps not even worthy of the Daily Mail in its darker moments - and it was on the Beeb.

Last week’s airing by Auntie on its Sunday Morning Live show of a discussion piece on sex education featured one Lynette Burrows (pictured), a rent-a-quote “family values” campaigner occasionally rolled out by broadcasters to spout off on anything from gay adoption to the cane. On this occasion she went way too far. “I think parents have the absolute right to protect their children from this sort of education which is so unhelpfully obsessed with destroying childhood innocence, in a way that’s reminiscent of paedophilia,” she opined. “To me, anyone who wants to talk dirty to little children is a danger to them.”

What Ms Burrows appears to be saying is that if you teach sex and relationship education (SRE), she thinks there’s something of the paedo about you. It is pretty much impossible to know where to start with this.

Saving a class-action libel case on the behalf of all SRE teachers, and perhaps a BBC-wide ban on the use of her services, it falls to TES to place Ms Burrows firmly on the naughty step. For a very long time.