My children are special to me, and they have needs (like they need to be told to get up for school). But I don’t think they have special needs. The way things are heading, that alone may yet make them part of a “special” minority.

The Ruth Kelly ballyhoo highlighted one problem with special needs education: the policy of “inclusion” which means sticking children with serious difficulties in mainstream schools without specialist help, to the detriment of all. But an even bigger problem is the crazed expansion of the category “special needs”.

According to the Department for Education, almost 1.5 million children in England now have special educational needs — around 18 per cent of the total. Call me stupid, but how could that possibly be? It must reflect the fashion for medicalising childhood problems — see apparent epidemics of everything from autism to attention deficit disorder. It could also have something to do with special needs being a ticket for schools to obtain resources and parents to get their children school places.

And that’s not all. This week Alan Johnson, the Education Secretary, announced plans for all schools to adopt “personalised learning and teaching”. Today’s official mantra is that every child is unique — that is, they all have special needs.

God knows the system is bad enough, but this could make it worse. Even if state schools had resources for one-to-one teaching, a personalised system means abandoning the democratic ideal of a universal education. Except in rare cases, most kids surely do best by interacting with others and learning through a teacher who is more than their mentor or mate — not sitting in a personal ghetto with only their personal computer from which to copy the answers.

• Hero: “A person admired for brave deeds and noble qualities . . . regarded as a model or ideal.” Which is why when you hear the word, you might not immediately think of Neil Kinnock, Norman Tebbit, Shirley Williams, Clare Short and Alex Salmond. Yet along with Margaret Thatcher and Tony Benn, these are the shortlisted nominees for the BBC Politics Show’s Living Political Hero.

  How many of this motley crew are “living” in a political sense? The only active MP, now that Ms Short is retiring as an MP, is Mr Salmond, token Celt and second-hand leader of the Scottish National Party; hardly Braveheart. Most of the nominees reflect a retreat into fantasy politics, nostalgia for what many imagine were the grand old days of political principle when men were men and women were prime minister. Unsurprisingly Baroness Thatcher and Mr Benn are well ahead in the online poll, the ghosts of politics past conjured up to shadow-box for the wrinkly Right and Left.

  There are no especially heroic political figures these days. Or perhaps we should say that every politician is now equally “special”.

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