Is the election campaign getting dirty?

Tories say teacher-shortages result in street crime

Children burning cars because teacher-shortages have meant the cancellation of their lessons provide a powerful piece of television imagery.

But was the Conservative election broadcast justified?

As the Archbishops of Canterbury and York speak out against negative campaigning we ask what effect controversial election advertising really has.

Other parties have wasted no time in condemning the Tories for a piece of political advertising - they say - designed to scare voters and vilify young people.

Education policy

On Friday the party set out to sell the positive side of their education policy, but this still involved a catalogue of woe from William Hague about the dire state of schools today, including statistics on the number of children who admit to having carried out a crime in the past year - one in four.

And a reference to children 'vandalising property, stealing from shops, spraying grafitti and threatening or assaulting people in public'.

Theresa May: Would end the bureacracy responsible for low morale amongst teachers

Tory education spokeswoman Theresa May told the World at One parents must play their part in ensuring their children behaved at school.

She promised to turn around the problem of disheartened teachers leaving the profession due to bureacracy and disruptive pupils.

"The government is not even recognising the problem of teacher shortages," she said.

The Tory broadcast has divided people in education.

Brian Jones, headteacher of the Archbishop Tennyson School - next to the Oval Cricket Ground in south London - told us it was important to get home the message about shortages of teachers.

But that view is not shared by everyone. Jim Hudson, head teacher of The Two Mile Ash, in Milton Keynes, said the problem was much more complicated than the way the Tories had portrayed it.

Anthony Lawton from the National Youth Agency, an independent charity working with young people, is also profoundly critical of the Tory broadcast.

UnChristian?

By coincidence, negative political campaigning was attacked in an open letter on Friday by the Archbishops of Canterbury and York.

They warned Christians not to be tempted by the short-term and self-serving policies on offer.

Voters should be looking instead at the underlying values and beliefs of the candidates.

The Bishop of Hereford, John Oliver, told the World at One that voters should decide themselves which party was most likely to deliver Christian objectives.

"The archbishops are not recommending any particular way of voting and neither would I be, but people have to think very carefully about this," he said.

"All the parties are claiming they are going to improve public services in different ways and it's up to the electorate to choose which one is most likely to achieve that objective and to vote for the one which is going to provide the best kind of society for us to live in," he added.

Charles Kennedy, however, told us that he wasn't sure bishops should be taking part in election campaigns.

"The bishops have got their pulpits and they should stick to that.

"The politicians should get on with the much more worldly pulpits we sit in occasionally, particularly during general elections," he said.