WE at the Evening Advertiser would like to apologise to Education Secretary Estelle Morris for choosing such a bad time yesterday to confront her over the Government's appalling funding of Swindon's schools.

Ms Morris, you may recall, had refused us an interview on an issue that affects thousands of parents, teachers and children and has turned Swindon into the poor relation of the British education system.

So we gave her a broadside on yesterday's front page to coincide with her arrival in town to speak at a local government education conference. It was hard-hitting, but quite polite and had one simple aim: to get her attention on a serious threat to our children's future.

It worked a treat. An irate Ms Morris gave our reporter Ian Fannon her full attention as she castigated us for daring to attack her, claimed we had not given her enough time to answer any questions and insisted that she would give us an interview in the next week or so.

She interspersed her rollicking of Mr Fannon with countless reminders that she had a "very tight schedule'' and said this had not been taken into account by anyone, least of all the Evening Advertiser.

By way of illustration, she said she was so busy that a delegation of exasperated education authority representatives and headteachers from Swindon could only have a ten-minute audience yesterday.

So we'd like to say we're sorry, Ms Morris.

We're sorry that you think "too busy'' is any sort of an excuse for an elected representative to trot out when faced with a town whose education services are falling apart.

We're sorry that, despite your promise of an interview, you have not seen fit to respond personally to TWO previous written pleas by the Evening Advertiser for a meaningful dialogue on the issue.

We're sorry that you could only squeeze in a delegation of council officers and teachers from Swindon for a tea-break chat about the problems facing the worst funded local education authority in the country.

And if you can't do better than this in future Ms Morris and replace weak excuses, trite policy statements and empty rhetoric with real dialogue and real improvements to school funding, then we're very, very sorry that you were ever appointed Education Secretary in the first place.