The Department for Children, Schools and Families. I wonder if its remit is big enough – shouldn’t it take on Adults too!

If it was Children, Adults, Animals, Schools, Families, Birds, Fish and Everything Else we might be able to manage with smaller government.

Anyway, as I was saying, the DCSF is to offer children as young as seven careers advice.

The programme “aims to broaden the horizons and raise the aspirations of children from deprived backgrounds”.

Reading between the lines it’s an attempt to encourage children from “poorer backgrounds” to consider university as an option. I suspect if they made it a bit more financially attractive to go into higher education then people who weren’t born into aristocracy might be more encouraged to pursue that path.

But university is not for everyone.

I went to the University of Life, having come through the School of Hard Knocks along the way.

Well actually that’s not true.

I went to grammar school, because Lincolnshire was one of the few counties left with them, and then I went to Wolverhampton Polytechnic. Wooly Pully as we called it.

There were two reasons I chose this path.

Firstly I didn’t get good enough grades at A-level to go anywhere else.

And secondly I didn’t know what I wanted to do as a career at 18, and four years doing Humanities seemed like a good way of delaying having to decide.

Twenty-three years later I can honestly say that I still don’t know what I really want to do with my life. I’m happy doing what I do, sub editing the mighty journal you see before you (unless you’re reading this online in which case can I just remind you that the paper copy of the Daily Echo is a great read too. Buy one and see for yourself!). However, going back to where I started (I don’t mean all those days ago when I was a wastrel student) I wonder what today’s seven-year-olds will want to be. What sort of careers advice will the DCSF offer them?

I speak with some authority on this subject as I have a seven-year-old daughter who is quite clear what she wants to be when she gets older.

She wants to be an explorer. Go girl, I say.

Mind you, her preparations for this so far include: spending ages looking at herself in the mirror while singing made-up pop songs, dancing from room to room playing teachers with her little sister, creeping up on her poor father when he tries to relax and scaring the life out of him, bouncing on a trampoline and leaving her digital camera out all night in the rain.

I’m encouraging her to do as many things as she can: swim, ride her bike, dance, act in the town pantomime (Snow White at the Tivoli – tickets on sale now!), chase butterflies and trap insects (humanely), go pond dipping, learn to ski – have I said enough?

When she tells her school’s career adviser (yeah right, like that sort of thing will filter down to deepest Dorset!) I wonder how they’ll help her.

Hopefully they’ll have a kitty to fund a great trip abroad, trekking through tropical jungles in search of rare species. Hope they have the funding to send her dad along too, to carry her bags while she concentrates on the important stuff.

And hopefully they’ll encourage her to follow her dreams, wherever that may lead. (Bearing in mind the Bank of Dad is limited and will have to fund her little sister’s hopes and dreams too, although they mainly seem to involve chocolate at the moment).