SIXTEEN-year-old student Rachael Nicholson has set her heart on a career as a veterinary nurse - but pettifogging bumbledom looks like dashing her hopes.

She has gained a place at the only college in Lancashire that can provide her with the qualifications. But it is way across the county from her Bacup home - at Myerscough, north of Preston.

Yet education officials expect the teenager to spend each day travelling five hours to and fro. It would mean her getting up at 5.30am and not getting home until well after six o'clock at night.

But there is an alternative that Rachael is being denied.

She had hoped to be a live-in student at Myerscough College. But a cash-strapped county education committee has pulled the plug on discretionary lodging grants. So the choice for Rachael is a gruelling routine of bus, train and shanks's pony, or seeing her career hopes crumble.

But the real rub is that her weekly travel bill, which the county would pay, is virtually the same as the lodging grant that it has withdrawn.

Surely, with a little common sense and flexibility on the county's part, Rachael's problem could be solved at a stroke.

But is it the case that somewhere in a grey office in the confines of County Hall an unyielding grey-suited official is responding with that age-old bureaucrat's mantra: "Sorry, but it's the rules."?

If so, it is a silly, cruel rule that needs bending.

We have already seen the bizarre business of another Lancashire college actually laying on a 57-seater bus for just one student to travel the same sort of distance across the county.

This girl isn't asking for anything like that. She only wants the flexibility to spend the county's money on a bed for a night instead of travel tickets.

And she should get it - forthwith.

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