I hate to nit pick...

I AM sure that the new Education Secretary, justine Greening, has her hands full, especially with the prospect of bringing back grammar schools south of the Border.

But as a mother of school-aged children, I have a special request: please can we bring back the nit nurse?

Earlier this month, new research showed that the lice are becoming increasingly resistant to common, over-the-counter treatments. That means there is now only one sure-fire way of eradicating them: you have to comb them out, one by sodding one.

This is exactly how I have spent my evenings on holiday over the past two weeks, extracting the mites from my daughter’s long hair.

At last count, I found three ‘babies’ (too small to lay eggs yet), which means that with any luck we will be a nit-free household by the time she returns to school in September. just in time to catch them again. I am no particular fan of Philip Green’s business practices, but in the interests of fairness, it should be pointed out that while BHS pensioners face a £571 million hole in their fund, it was announced yesterday that companies in the FTSE 100 have a combined pension fund deficit of £63 billion, a sharp rise on last year’s £46 billion, which itself was almost double the figure for the year before. Something dodgy is going on, that’s for sure, and however badly he may have behaved, I suspect Green isn’t the only villain.