Very good analogy, I think. 
I always want to know more. Don’t feel obliged, but if you have more you want to say, please continue.
Okay - well it’ll have to be tomorrow as my cold has now got the better of me and I’m heading to bed. If you have any specific questions then post them and I’ll answer them (as best I can) tomorrow. I would point out that I’m kind of straying out of my area of expertise here but I still know a good deal about government process and constitutional law so can probably give a brief run down of the main points.
Here in Philadelphia we elected a Nutter. IMHO He’s done a good job so far.
If it required an elected official to make decisions down to this level we’d need an army of them that would make the current army of them look like a squad.
The average Englishman likes the Church of England to be there for him not to go to.
How it’s going to go on funding itself, and patching up all those leaky old buildings, some of which are tourist attractions in their own right, is a question no one wants to answer.
One of the obstacles to Disestablishment would be that sorting out Church assets and public assets and repealing or modifying hundreds of laws going back down centuries which touched on the Church, would take many years. And almost nobody’s demanding it.
I find this thread (and your job) most interesting.
I teach in a Public School which was founded by an Archdeacon. We have a daily Christian service and modern religious lessons but we don’t preach at the pupils.
I’m an atheist, but have been invited to give a sermon in our Chapel (I chose ‘The Loch Ness Monster, Aliens and God’).
I believe Creationism is discussed in religious classes, along with Buddhism, Hinduism etc.
The only time Creationism was mentioned in Science was when a teacher challenged the pupils to use their knowledge to disprove it. 
Well there are faith-based independent school that exist so people with extremely firm religious views (mainly Christian, Muslim and Jewish) have a place to send their children. There they can (and do) actually teach them the world is 6000 years old and created by god in the context of science. This scares me slightly.
I’d be interested to know how much of an eye is kept on what is taught during school time outside of schools themselves, i.e on field trips?
The reason I ask is there’s a local zoo nearabouts that’s really popular with primary schools in the area. So much so that the local council has gone to the expense of siting a bus stop immediately outside of the zoo’s gates, an expensive procedure that included widening the road. Friends’ children who attend local non-faith based schools have been on field trips there. The zoo even offers an outreach service so that they can teach kids about animals etc in the schools themselves, and supports the national curriculum.
All sounds good, right? The zoo itself is a lovely place:
Then you notice the ‘fish’ flag outside their grounds. You dig a little deeper into the education pages of their website:
etc.
I don’t have the slightest care that parents may be taking their kids here for a fun day out not realising it’s a creationist project. I do have an issue that public funds are being spent on both taking school children on official trips to a creationist project, and on siting bus stops specifically to assist people in visiting a creationist project (or any other religious and commercial venture, I suppose). Is there anyone based in local authorities keeping an eye on this sort of thing, or are we just supposed to see it as a useful local resource that the kiddies enjoy? Which I’m sure they do, I would’ve.
Blimey, I didn’t know we had places like that in the UK. Disturbing.
That said, I wonder what the reaction over the pond would be to discovering that the person implementing government policy on creationism posted naked photos of himself on the net and had an interest in vampires?!
My reaction? You go, fella!
Believe me, I’m not the wierdest civil servant out there by a long shot - I’m practically dull in comparison to some of the people I work with. But don’t worry, go I shall! 
To answer the question about the zoo, it’s firmly the responsibility of schools to check out the education provision of sites they visit. Taking a bunch of kids on a school trip is no small feat and if you’re willing to do that you really need to check out who you’re visiting and be clear what you expect the children to get from it. Living in the information age as we do there’s no excuse for not realising that a site or organisation may have an agenda contrary to the curriculum or related policy - the zoo pretty much states that itself on its website, it’s not exactly hidden.
In the context of visits to sites relating to Science, Technology, Engineering and Maths an organisation called STEMNET has produced something called the STEM directories (one for each subject) which lists what are considered the best sites to go and see. The sites had to apply to be included in the directories and were evaluated - I would imagine a site as blatant as that zoo would not have made it in (but I might just check actually). Obviously you don’t have to be in the directory for people to visit you, but it certainly helps (and schools have said for a long time they’d like one place to find all the information so I imagine once they have it they’re not going to bother with people who aren’t in it).
The DCSF also has a policy called Learning Outside the Classroomwhich is about how to get the best out of school visits and what can be gained educationally from non-classroom based learning but that’s mainly sites demonstrating they’ve given due thought and care to safety and relevance and it’s almost entirely self-regulated.
It scares me too.
Fab, thanks, good to know there’s proper guidance. But it’s up to schools if they want to ignore the guidance fully available to them and introduce a coachload of 5 year olds to “creationist biology”. Do you think it’s likely that central gub’mint will ever take the choice out of individual publicly-funded schools’ hands, or is that just too difficult to implement/too nanny-statey? I don’t have a problem with the project itself (although I do think they could be a clearer about the nature of the scheme from their home page onwards, I knew what I was looking for) but don’t feel comfortable with local schools using this for science field trips. I suppose it would be up to individual parents to complain if they felt similarly?
Seriously. I work for my LA in a completely unrelated field and we’re bloomin horrendous in a yokelly inbred wurzels kind of way, but our bosses in that Lunnun really take the we-suck-at-being-functional-adults biscuit.
Heh. Not that I’m bitter, about recent decisions affecting my work, or anything.