Educayshun, educasion, edyoucation

Firms should stay local for the best results

Human nature being what it is, we cannot help being more affected by stories – whether cheerful or tragic – that are closer to home.

That is why issues like the bid to build a Tesco store in Sheringham and a wind turbine at Bodham capture more interest around here than mass starvations or epic natural disasters in sub-Saharan Africa.

And it is one reason why the community-centric EDP and Archant Norfolk’s weekly papers continue to buck the nationwide trend of falling newspaper sales.

For me, the reality of that theory hit home last week when Young’s Seafood announced the likely closure of its Cromer Crab Company facility, with the loss of 230 jobs.

I say "likely" because it is embarking on one of my least favourite things – a period of consultation. The cynic in me believes that consultation is usually a tick-box exercise that allows large companies and local authorities to keep administrators and HR chiefs happy.

It rarely results in a change of heart from the executives whose focus on the bottom line blurs their view of the front line.

In this case, as someone who has "Cromer" embedded in my DNA, I have to hope that I am wrong.

I have to hope that Young’s really wants to consult its employees, the local crab fishermen, economic development experts and the town’s traders. I have to hope that it is genuinely interested in listening to new ideas of how to make the business profitable.

If not, the impact on my town will be devastating.

In a town of 7,000 people, many of whom are retired, losing 230 jobs would be a disaster, and could take decades to recover from.

There are simply not the alternative jobs for people to access in the local area, and some hard-working people – both from Cromer and from Eastern Europe – would be forced to uproot from their community or become jobless.

It brings me to one of the great conundrums faced by Norfolk.

How do you continue to make this county an attractive place to live, while also providing the employment to satisfy our children’s ambitions?

I want my children to be able to stay in the area where they were born, raised and where their roots are – if they want to. But they will probably have to pull up those roots to get on in life.

And if big businesses continue to regard Norfolk as an outpost and its workers as numbers on an HR file, that is unlikely to change.

My worry is that firms like Young’s do not take into account the "soft" side of a situation when they make business decisions.

Its executives will have no love for Cromer, and no interest in the town and its people.

That is because too many larger organisations have lost their sense of community.

It apparently no longer matters where you do your business from, as long as the profits are higher.

That is why Norwich Union "offshored" so much of its work to Indian call centres and eventually offloaded its name in favour of Aviva.

That is why businesses buy local firms, asset strip them and close them.

But they miss the point. For it is not only cold economics that equals employee efficiency. The most productive workforces are happy ones. And much of that happiness comes from the camaraderie that grows from a community.

Don't let your children join the clone army

Children are not all the same.

It seems such an obvious statement. But, embroiled in an education system that forces them to jump through the same hoops and a society that seeks to fashion a generation of clones, it is worth repeating.

This none-too-incisive observation really hit home to me at the weekend, when I was sitting in the sunshine on Cromer seafront with my wife.

Our youngest son was doing death defying front flips off the prom and trying to land on his feet on the sand a long way below. He succeeded – sometimes. And I wondered how a man who was defeated by the humble forward roll could play a part in producing him.

Meanwhile, next son up was closely studying a millipede that he had found on the beach.

Two boys with the same parents, yet with completely different tastes and abilities.

If that is true for them, it is equally true for every other child. They are all fashioned by God to be individuals, unique to look at and unique in the way they see and interact with the world around them.

So why do we try to force this myriad of human pegs into the same round hole?

Some elements of our education system typify how we are letting down our children.

The standard assessment tests (Sats) examine whether seven-, 11- and 14-year-olds know certain facts and can do certain things. Many schools, fearing the shame of a poor placing in the league tables, teach to the tests and assist in the cultivation of the army of child clones.

At GCSE, it is little better. There are precious few exam questions that give a 16-year-old the chance to show their passion for or breadth of understanding of a subject.

Instead, they are encouraged to regurgitate the same "facts" that their peers have to spew forth to make the grade.

And things can only get worse. My children have the English baccalaureate to look forward to. Whether or not they have a gift for particular subjects, they will be effectively forced to study them, along with every other student in a system that is becoming more like factory farming than education.

A top chef wouldn’t take Cromer crab, Morston mussels, hand-picked strawberries, Norfolk chutneys and samphire from The Wash and put it all in a blender to produce a soulless soup.

But successive governments have done just that with our unique children.

The situation is exacerbated by societal pressures on children to conform: to wear the same clothes, listen to the same music, like the same "stars", follow the same football teams and speak the same, like, garbled, like, language.

It all adds to the pressure on parents to swim against the tide to encourage our children to be non-conformist and individual.

I took rather too long to come to terms with one of my sons not enjoying the rough-and-tumble of a full-blooded football match, and giving up cricket because he didn’t fancy a hard ball fizzing towards his head.

You see, he wasn’t born to be a carbon copy of me.

As the external pressures bear down on them and seek to squeeze into preordained moulds, our children must be allowed to express their individuality.

There is one exception, though. I will never accept my sons’ liking for the mysoginistic, strutting rubbish that has wrongly been labelled "R&B". We owe it to our children to resist it.

Think before you tweet

We are in an instant era. It is a time of instant heroes, instant "stars" and instant villains.

Norfolk singer Ronan Parke went from nowhere to everywhere in the time it took to belt out a song. And Norwich City fan Luke O’Donoghue went from anonymous to infamous in no time at all.

He had an unsavoury thought, and made the mistake of instantly sharing it on the social networking website Twitter.

It spread like Japanese knotweed. And, appropriately, justice was handed out summarily by the Carrow Road bosses. Now Mr O’Donoghue will have plenty of quiet Saturday afternoons at home, during which he can rue his failure to think before he tweeted.

it was a perfect case study of how life has changed. And it worries me.

As a regular user of both Facebook and Twitter, I am often guilty of saying a lot when I don’t really have anything to say. And I have occasionally posted a comment that I should have kept to myself.

I see it all too often from some of my Facebook friends and those who I follow on Twitter. I recall such thought-provoking gems as "I am going to have a bath" and "not sure what to have for tea".

I wait with anticipation for the first "I am on the toilet" comment.

The line between public and private is not just blurred, it has been erased.

Yet people have largely failed to grasp that one false tweet can end a career, destroy a reputation or finish a friendship.

When people go to a party, the photographs are on Facebook before the last hanger-on has left. And, while all those embarrassing incidents used to be swiftly forgotten by all but a few people, they can now be seen by thousands.

When someone’s relationship is on the rocks, there is no space for them to work things out because one of them has usually changed their Facebook status to "single" in the heat of the moment.

Meanwhile, friends fall out as what ought to be private conversations are played out for all to read –and get involved in.

For the younger generation, all of this is perfectly normal.

Everything has to happen immediately. If a sent text message is not responded to within minutes or a mobile phone answered instantly, the receiver must have either stopped being your friend or has fallen down a manhole.

It must be bamboozling for people from older generations who did not have a way of publicly sharing their every thought.

If they wanted to make a point, it would have to be via a letter. And they would often have to wait for weeks or even months for a reply.

The beauty of a letter – unlike a text, Facebook or Twitter – is that it is composed slowly and thoughtfully.

A badly-worded phrase can be crossed out, while anger or inappropriateness can be screwed up and filed in the bin as the blood cools from boiling point and the writer reflects.

If I wasn’t so impatient and lazy, I’d love to share fewer of my undeveloped thoughts on Twitter and Facebook and set down more of my more considered feelings in letters.

Unfortunately, the art of the letter is likely to become extinct.

So all I can do is hope that my children’s generation will take on board two bits of advice.

Think before you tweet: a few seconds of thought could head off a disaster.

And, for the sake of your dignity, try to keep much of your life private.

Parents, let your children be children

Hats – and saucy corsets – off to Mothers’ Union boss Reg Bailey.

Reg is not a name that I expected to see as the chief executive of this institution. But his report and recommendations about the commercialisation and sexualisation of children are suitably commonsense. He recognises that the sexualisation in particular of children is a genuine concern among mums and dads.

And he understands that we need help to protect our youngsters from inappropriate products, scenes and images, including unacceptably raunchy acts on supposed "family" shows like Britain’s Got Talent.

Under the changes proposed by Mr Bailey’s review, steamy pop videos would be restricted to older teenagers and later television slots and magazines featuring sexualised images covered up on shelves.

And all new home internet services, laptops or mobile phones would have the option to ban adult material.

Parents would also be given more say in the television watershed guidelines.

The review coincides with stricter guidance for shops selling children’s clothing.

In case you didn’t know, that includes padded bras for under-10s and lacy lingerie that is currently marketed to children. Sick.

Hollywood habits make the action plan more difficult, though.

One day Miley Cyrus is the wholesome star of the TV show Hannah Montana. Not to my taste, but something no parent would be uncomfortable with their child watching.

In the blink of an eye, though, the pin-up of the Western world’s tweenagers has "reinvented" herself to become the scantily-clad pin-up for leering young – and not so young – men.

Others – including Britney Spears and Christina Aguilera – have done the same, and played their part in making young, impressionable girls think that success is proportionate to the amount of flesh you display.

However, the biggest stumbling block on Reg’s road to reclaiming childhood for children lies closer to home. It’s the parents. Not all of them, clearly, but certainly a sizeable minority.

The same mums and dads who no doubt see a "pervert" lurking on every street corner are all too happy to send their children hurtling towards premature adulthood in knee-high boots and lashings of make-up.

The tasteless behaviour begins almost at birth.

No sooner are they out of the womb and given a wipe down than their spongy feet are forced into Adidas trainers. I’m only glad that parents have the good grace to keep back the boots until the child is walking.

Another essential stop on the rite (wrong?) of passage to premature adulthood is the ear piercing, which is always accompanied by the sound of a small child screaming and the parents shouting "shut up, Savannah, it looks lovely".

The poor girl is then smeared with more make-up than Barbara Cartland, and dolled up in revealing clothes and a pair of boots.

It is wrong, it is exploitative and it is abusive.

It happens because too many parents think that their children are toys, not people. They parade them like trophies, making their identity depend on the label on their clothes.

Unfortunately, there doesn’t seem to be a legislative solution to the problem. So how about this? Let’s make the offenders walk the streets of their home town in unfashionable clothes until they confess and treat their children as children again.

School governor role is a potential nightmare

If I was a bit more photogenic, I could be a poster boy for David Cameron’s Big Society.

Despite knowing all the words to the 1980s Grange Hill song Just Say No, I am not very good at rejecting requests.

If someone needs a volunteer, I’m your man. (Although, the fact that I’m being asked makes me more of a pressed man than a volunteer).

Anyway, the upshot is that I am often found sharing my limited wisdom with young people at the local church youth club on a Friday evening. Lucky them.

And since last September I have been on the governing body at a school.

The role appealed to me because I went to the school and all my children either did or will do. "Giving something back" was the cliché that sprang to mind. And, as someone who wasn’t exactly a model student, it could even be described as doing penance.

Little did I realise what it would involve, though.

The man who twisted my arm into agreeing estimated there would be six to 10 meetings per year and a few visits to the school. He didn’t know that there’d be a headteacher resignation and an academy consultation process within the first year.

And that is where things have become a little more tricky.

For at all schools, hugely important decisions are taken by enthusiastic lay people who rarely have expertise about the inner workings of the education system.

To be fully up to speed, one has to have a PhD in acronyms and an accountancy degree. And, in order to do the job properly, any professional with a family has to perform the impossible trick of making time.

While it is a rewarding role, it is very hard work. And it is going to become more difficult.

For, while the government extols the virtues of Big Society, the cuts hitting education are making it more challenging for Norfolk’s thousands of governors to be effective.

The selection process for the new headteacher was made so much more manageable by the presence and input of our school improvement partner from County Hall. As an experienced ex-head, his advice was priceless.

But school improvement partners are among the victims of cost-cutting. There will be fewer of them in Norfolk, and their visits to schools will be more sporadic.

The blow will be felt at almost all of Norfolk’s 440-plus state schools.

And it comes at a time when many governors and headteachers are trying to cope with falling funding and a feeling of flux as the government tears up strategies and heralds arguably the biggest education revolution for decades.

Thankfully, the real leaders of schools – headteachers – are very capable, and provide excellent advice and support to their governors.

But the ultimate responsibility for what goes on in schools does fall on the heads of the governors –usually a worthy band of parents, teachers, business people and retired folk with some time on their hands.

For something as make or break as the education of the next generation, it does seem extraordinary that such a burden lands on volunteers.

What is more extraordinary is that they – we – will now have to make life-altering decisions with even less support.

It will impact on the quality of schools. And the difficult task of finding enough governors could well become impossible.

Party politics has no place in local government

I have a problem with the recent local elections. I’m probably a little embittered because I missed an entire night’s sleep as I waited for the North Norfolk District Council results to be declared.

But that is not the chief reason for my problem with this local demonstration of democracy.

In essence, I am heartily sick of candidates at town and district council level being affiliated to political parties.

I cannot see the point of it.

As a journalist, I accept that it makes for more stories, as results at local level can be used to indicate shifts in the wind direction nationally.

But as an elector, it is an insult to my intelligence to present me with a collection of candidates who do not have the courage to stand on their own convictions, but prefer to hide behind a political party.

What I want to know is how a candidate is going to tackle the ultra-local issues that affect my community. I want to know their record of making a positive difference.

But what I got was a pile of junk mail masquerading as election leaflets. It told me much more about what the Tories, Labour and Lib Dems had achieved nationally than what the candidate would do locally.

One of the candidates in my ward is someone who I know works tirelessly to serve my community. But she, like almost every other candidate, chose to affiliate herself with a party that I cannot support.

So she did not get my vote.

Across North Norfolk, the curse of party politics triggered a remarkable swing from a big Lib Dem majority on the district council to a big Tory majority.

Having run the council pretty well for eight years, the Lib Dems were punished at the polls for the sins of their national leaders, whose part in the coalition government has not gone down well with voters.

In the process, some very good councillors with their communities at heart were tossed aside. Their experience will be missed.

If they were independent candidates, they would not have been at the mercy of such a shift of public opinion. And the district would have stood to benefit from their service for more years.

Unfortunately, of the 48 councillors elected for North Norfolk, only one is an independent.

It seems that the candidates have forgotten the fantastic contribution made over many years by independents like Tom Moore, Cyril Durrant and Vera Woodcock.

Their consciences were never compromised by having to adhere to the party whip. They could simply make decisions on the basis of what they believed to be the best for their communities.

On top of this, at the North Norfolk count, party affiliation created cliques of people who clustered together on the basis of the colours of their rosettes.

Without the rosettes and the party partiality, they would have been able to mix more naturally and share the love.

Meanwhile, on the social networking site Twitter, candidates seemed to be more interested in gloating over the failings of rival parties than making any sensible comments about what was happening.

If affiliation to parties was removed, "yah, boo, sucks" politics would be kicked out of our town halls and left as the preserve of Parliament.

Bin Laden killing is a failure of Western democracy

Mahatma Gandhi had a decent turn of phrase and a fair degree of common sense.

One of his real gems is "an eye for an eye makes the whole world go blind".

That was what came instantly to my mind when I heard of the death of Osama bin Laden in Pakistan. The phrase borrows from the Hebrew scripture, in Deuteronomy chapter 19, which says: "Show no pity: life for life, eye for eye, tooth for tooth, hand for hand, foot for foot".

It was part of God’s instructions for the official legal system to be instituted as the Israelites prepared to enter Canaan.

But too often down the years it has been used by people of all creeds to justify vengeance, not justice.

Gandhi saw the perils of its misuse and pithily summed up the potential results.

Unfortunately, too often our leaders do not heed such wisdom.

When Osama bin Laden oversaw the 9:11 attacks, the response from the then president, George W Bush, was perfunctorily about hunting him down and seeking justice. But the clear sub-plot was revenge.

Bin Laden’s death does not deserve to be mourned. His life is not to be celebrated. And, if I’m being honest, I did feel a slight sense of excitement when I heard of his demise.

I think of the thousands of families who still suffer daily the aching pain of loss from the many terrorist atrocities that bin Laden was behind.

His death brings a certain degree of closure to some of those people, whose anguish at losing a loved one has been exacerbated by the knowledge that bin Laden was still at large and spreading his message of hate.

But it should not be the trigger for whooping, hollering and high fives outside the White House.

Such feral demonstrations yesterday morning left me feeling sick – and fearful for what the repercussions might be.

I suspect it may be partly cultural. While there are some unsavoury examples of lynch mobs outside courthouses in the UK, there remains a decent balance between justice and revenge.

In the US, the death penalty exists in many states. And that is a punishment that I believe crosses the line from justice to revenge. So perhaps I should not be surprised when the baying Washington crowds wave the Stars and Stripes and behave in exactly the same way as the supporters of al Qaida do when terrorists detonate bombs in the West.

Not that they will notice the irony of their actions. Nor will they recognise that the cold-blooded execution of a human being – however inherently evil he appears – is a failure of the "American way" that they celebrate.

Here we had a man being killed without a trial, which goes against the heart of the democratic, balanced system that we purport to defend.

In this country, both David Cameron and William Hague achieved the perfect tone, by welcoming bin Laden’s death with an absence of gloating and a degree of regret that it was necessary.

Meanwhile, the boyfriend of one of the 7:7 bomb victims spoke with quiet dignity on BBC Breakfast, saying: "A human being has died. And that is never to be celebrated".

His words should be repeated to everyone who thinks that we are engaged in a worldwide Call of Duty game, where we "take out" targets.

What we are engaged in is a global conflict that is likely to escalate as those on bin Laden’s side, who certainly believe in "an eye for an eye", seek vengeance against the West. How long will it be before the world does indeed "go blind"?

Gardening is for girls

Spring has sprung and it’s high time for us to take up our trowels, don our gloves and get grubby in our gardens.

Not likely. I cannot stand gardening – at least not the faffing about with seedlings, pruning, edging and low-level weeding that make it so tedious.

It’s a pastime designed for the fairer sex. And it’s not just me who thinks that.

A survey of 2,000 people found "women are better at choosing, arranging and tending to flowers, planting hanging baskets and selecting garden ornaments".

Men are just about to be trusted with digging beds or pushing the mower, although I have a convenient back problem that always flares up just in time to get me out of those mind-numbing tasks.

Despite society’s best efforts to blur the lines between the sexes, and a procession of male TV gardeners who have attempted to make flower selection manly, some things are better suited to women. In our garden, the differences are stark.

My wife’s definition of gardening is something like: "Planting pretty flowers and arranging pots to make everything look delightful."

My definition is something like: "Pulling out plants, moving heavy things and covering anything colourful with slabs and concrete."

Ground Force’s macho earth-mover Tommy Walsh is my garden hero, not the rather more prissy Alan Titchmarsh.

Freshly-turned soil is a terrible temptation for those most evil of animals, cats. One day I will do myself a mischief leaping off the sofa and sprinting into the garden to shoo a fat ginger moggy away, just before it leaves a steaming deposit next to our lilacs.

Either that, or I will finally snap and plant a landmine that leaves parts of the said feline in the gardens of dozens of people along our street.

So, to save me a visit from the RSPCA and spare the owners of the cat from grief, that is yet another argument in favour of covering gardens with concrete.

It also makes it far easier to set up tables laden with food and beer for seasonal barbecues with friends or family. A stable table is worth so much more than an eye-catching flower bed that restricts the number of invitees.

Not that I object to my wife enjoying the garden. I’m quite happy to watch her pottering about while I sip a cold beer, read the paper and occasionally give her useful (and no doubt very welcome) pointers from my panoramic position on the patio.

Of course, anyone in a relationship will know that the male-female garden divide is something that extends into the house.

Take marital bedrooms for example.

How many do you see with Top Gear bedcovers and a wall covered with hundreds of beer mats? That’s how they would look if men had their way.

But, in the same way that we cede control of the garden to ’er outdoors, when she becomes ’er indoors she is also the overseer of prettying up the bedroom.

So we macho men have to endure pastel shades and bedspreads with a flurry of flowers. And the beds get made each day, with a cuddly toy reclining on the duvet as a final act of emasculation.

Of course, I do slightly resent this loss of authority, which leaves my garden and bedroom looking girlie. I really should put up some posters of Norwich v Ipswich from last week or photos of me and my mates at a beer festival.

But I’m prepared to give ground in order to retain control of the only thing that really matters: the TV remote.

Time to ignore sell-by dates

I hate it when food is wasted.

When my children were younger and fussier – before they started to eat me out of house, home and positive bank balance – I used to polish off my own meal, then turn my attention to the scraps left on their plates.

And, regardless of how much food is put in front of me, I always eat every last bit – to the point of licking the plate if there’s a nice sauce or gravy.

I am also the self-appointed "bin inspector", regularly checking the rubbish to ensure that nothing even vaguely edible has been dumped. I’ve been known to fish out an apple or an orange and put it back in the fruit bowl, so be very careful what you accept when offered food at my house.

Over-zealous habits aside, food waste is a very serious issue.

Apparently 1.3 million unopened yoghurt pots are dumped every day, along with 440,000 ready meals, 5,500 whole chickens (hopefully not still clucking), 4.4 million apples, 5.1 million potatoes and 1.6 million bananas. Bananas.

We, the great British public, throw out up to a quarter of our weekly food and drink purchases, costing the average family – as if that exists – £680 per year.

Much of the blame for that lies with our increasing obsession with sell-by dates.

If a yoghurt or a ready meal is one day beyond its sell-by date, too many people assume that it is carrying salmonella or E. coli and is as hot to handle as radioactive rock.

In a bid to cut the five million tons of food that we throw out each year, the government is now looking at axing sell-by and display-until stickers.

Only use-by dates would be kept, which give a much better indication of food safety, but should still be taken with a pinch of salt.

With the exception of some foods, including fish, prawns and eggs, which can genuinely make us ill if they lurk too long in the fridge, it is a very good idea.

And it could herald a long-overdue return to the days of common-sense kitchen husbandry.

The approach is simple, and has been tried and tested by generations of wise mothers, who managed to keep their kitchens organised and salmonella at bay long before sell-by dates muddied the washing up waters.

If you’ve got a jar of jam of uncertain vintage in the cupboard, take off the lid and check for mould. Then scrape off the mould and eat the jam.

If your bread is going a bit blue and stiff along the crust, cut off the crust, pop it in the toaster and get it down your neck.

Brown bananas? They taste sweet, so eat. Bruised apples? Cut off the bruise and devour it. After all, why should the entire apple be punished for one blemish.

As for milk, if it smells of sweaty feet or stilton, it’s probably not going to taste too nice on your morning cornflakes.

I’d dare to suggest that if all households introduced this simple regime, far less food would go to waste.

This doesn’t solve one other problem, though. In recent years the supermarkets have triggered an obsession with fruit and vegetables that look perfect – of a regulation size, without knobbly bits or characterful shapes.

It has fed the modern attitude that what we eat must first be pleasing on the eye – regardless of how little flavour these cloned foodstuffs actually have.

In the same way that a retired fisherman with a weathered face has an added piquancy to his stories, a bumpy apple or a pitted potato often has so much more to give to the palate.

Why I'd ban mobile phones in schools

I sometimes wonder how we survived without mobile phones while we were at school.

What did we do if we missed the bus home? Oh yes, we either walked or used the telephone in the school reception to contact our parents.

And if we had an urgent message for a friend during a maths lesson? Without the chance of sending a text, we simply scribbled a note on a piece of paper, made it into an aeroplane and flung it in their general direction.

For many years, people managed without mobile phones. Children still got educated – and got home every evening. They even managed to sort out their social lives via the oh-so-last-century medium of a face-to-face conversation.

Which is why I take a draconian view of mobile phones in schools. I would ban them outright.

Their supposed benefits are far outweighed by their negative points – including how they distract people from learning, and can be used to harass students or teachers, and to bully or humiliate people by taking photos and posting them on social networking sites.

They are also extremely expensive gadgets, and can be damaged or stolen, or create a "my phone’s better than yours" pecking order that alienates poorer children.

My children are not allowed to take their phones to school. In fact, they don’t even get one until they are 13, so for two of them it’s not an issue yet.

The debate is currently in the news because the government is trying to bring in legislation that would give school staff pumped-up powers to confiscate mobile phones and look at their content to check for inappropriate texts or images.

Remarkably, having rightly and repeatedly raised the issue of mobile phone abuse and cyber-bullying in classrooms, the National Association of Schoolmasters Union of Women Teachers (NASUWT) has opposed the new powers.

It’s almost as if, having asked for action, the union cannot bring itself to support the government – even when it does what is demanded of it.

I have some sympathy with the union’s point, that teachers would put themselves in difficult positions if they took advantage of their police-style "stop-and-search" powers.

Children would cry "civil liberties", and the usual minority of knee-jerk parents would storm into the school to oppose the treatment of their children –full of their "rights", but unable to grasp their responsibility to sit down, shut up and listen in lessons.

But children and parents do not run schools – staff and governors do. And, in order to ensure that the tail doesn’t wag the dog, there is certainly a need for firm action over mobile phones.

As I’ve already said, the easiest way to avoid any doubt – and to help teachers to reclaim the classrooms – would be to ban mobile phones and other devices like iPods from schools.

Some schools have already done it. And, while it’s tricky to enforce at first, if the rules are set out clearly enough and the disciplinary action enforced firmly, it makes schools more industrious places.

The downside of introducing a ban on mobiles in schools is that teachers will have to deal with the withdrawal symptoms.

I’ve seen at first hand what happens when a teenager is temporarily separated from his or her phone: there are genuine attachment and addiction issues, and panic attacks and cold sweats are only the beginning.

So if a ban is introduced, I would suggest that each school signs up an addiction counsellor to treat the poor lambs.

Police are wasting our time

Hands up if you have ever flashed your lights to warn other drivers about the presence of a mobile police speed camera?

I have, plenty of times. And I’m guessing that most other drivers have, too.

Now for the tricky bit. Hands up if you know that you are breaking the law by "obstructing police officers in the execution of their duty".

I didn’t, but I do now. And I’m infuriated.

My ignorance of the law ended last week when the police put out a statement saying that officers at Wells had stopped two motorists and warned them for flashing their lights to flag up a speed check.

A swift internet search turned up stories galore –including one where a man in his sixties was given a court fine and a criminal record for the same "offence" in Grimsby.

The issue sparked a heated office debate and quite a few Victor Meldrew "I don’t believe it" outbursts.

I have always understood that the object of police speed cameras is first and foremost to deter drivers from speeding.

The EDP used to publish every Monday the locations of the speed cameras for the coming week. That was done in agreement with the authorities, and no doubt caused plenty of people to kill their speed as they drove along the stretches of road where the cameras might be waiting.

Flashing one’s lights to warn motorists ought to be seen in the same way.

Now, I’m not going to suggest that drivers who flash their lights to warn about cameras are trying to stop speeding. No, they are doing it to help out their fellow motorists.

It’s a form of camaraderie, where road users unite against something that they loathe.

But there is also no way that anyone should be either warned or prosecuted for it.

At the moment, plenty of people believe that police speed cameras are a money-making device, not a safety measure.

By cracking down on people who flash their lights, officers are doing nothing to dispel that view. In fact, they are encouraging it.

The truth is, they should be either turning a blind eye to it or publicly thanking people for their crime prevention work.

That might sound odd, but bear with me.

If I pass a speed camera, then flash a number of drivers to warn them, surely I am preventing an offence, not committing one?

Invariably, those who are flashed will slow down to the speed limit or below. They will therefore be within the law, and less likely to be involved in the kind of incident that excess speed is a factor in.

The nub of the matter is that speed can kill. So every time somebody slows down, it is a victory for safety chiefs and another potential accident averted.

If this odd idea of "obstructing" is taken to its illogical conclusion, it begs endless questions.

What if I see two men having a fight and warn them that there’s a police officer walking towards them? Am I preventing a potentially serious crime or obstructing the officer?

And how about if my colleague is about to get in his car to drive to a meeting, and I tip him the wink that a speed camera van is parked at the top of Norwich Road in Cromer?

In future, if the police pull someone over for flashing their lights, and either warn or threaten to prosecute them for obstructing them in the execution of their duty, I think the driver should issue a warning: Let me go, or I’ll prosecute you for "wasting my time and obstructing me in the execution of my duty".

School mergers are on the horizon

As a Cromer lad raised on fierce football pitch battles against Sheringham, I understand the roots of local rivalry.

I’m not averse to jokes about "shady Shannocks" or a barbed reference to Suffolk or Ipswich. But when it goes beyond good-humoured sparring and becomes antipathy it stands in the way of progress.

Thankfully, Cromer and Sheringham have shown how to retain their differences but build on their strengths by launching a pincer movement that resulted in the successful Crab and Lobster Festival.

And Norfolk and Suffolk police forces ignored historic silliness between the two counties to merge services and save £10m.

At the moment, the talk at all levels of government is of collaboration, shared services, working together. With Whitehall squeezing the funding, it is one of the only ways to save money without hitting services or staff.

What I do not understand is why this principle has not significantly filtered through to schools.

At the moment, there is a dash by some schools to become academies, enticed by the promise of extra money and "freedom" from local authority control (for "freedom", the cynics might invite you to read "more responsibilities and less expert support").

It’s understandable. Education secretary Michael Gove has made it clear that academies are his pets, so schools cannot be blamed for feeling that they must join the short dash to freedom.

But I think some projects are established in isolation, and designed to shore up narrow interests, rather than make a genuine difference to the education of a generation of young people.

In a county where schools are often isolated geographically and in terms of contact with their neighbours, surely there is room for joint or grouped academies – either horizontally, high school with high school, or vertically, with primaries joining forces with secondaries.

Money would be saved. But it would also enable schools to share their expertise and have a more rounded vision of what is needed in the wider community.

And the horizontal model would at least tone down one of my pet hates – competition between schools for students.

Last week, we had the unnecessary and degrading annual event of millions of parents waiting for the postman for the "make or break" letter telling them which high school their child would go to.

It’s marketplace economics in the wrong context. If neighbouring schools were working together, they could quit the slick marketing and focus on life-changing education.

Last week’s announcement that five schools in the Aylsham area will be jointly seeking foundation status, in order to set up a charitable trust that will enable them to work more closely together, is a perfect case in point.

Rather than buying in all of their own services separately and making decisions in isolation, they will be able to jointly procure where possible and save money, and draw up wide-angle policies that take in the needs of all of the children in the cluster.

Meanwhile, Hockwold Primary and Methwold High – already run by one headteacher – are effectively merging. And, with Methwold planning to offer degrees, it raises the prospect of a single vision for education for children and young people from birth to graduation.

Partnerships, joint working, collaboration – or even, dare I say it, mergers – could just be the future for schools.

Norfolk's too good for you, Mr Gill

My faith exhorts and inspires me to turn the other cheek to provocation. And, on most occasions, I do just that.

Growing up with ginger hair, you get used to choosing between fight or flight. More often than not, I have chosen the latter.

But there are a few things that I will always fight for, including my family, my friends and my beloved county of Norfolk.

So when I read a Sunday Times review of the Rose and Crown at Snettisham by food critic AA Gill, I’m afraid the temptation to present a rather more risqué exposed cheek was overwhelming.

In case you missed exhibit A in the display case of snobbish, sneering London "journalism", here are a few highlights:

"If Norfolk didn’t exist, we would have to make it up, and then regret it"

Norfolk is a "backward place to allocate dark lusts, incest and idiocy"

"The hernia on the end of England"

"A poverty-bitten place, keeping up its stained trousers with baler twine".

No doubt he laughed to himself as he penned so many witty phrases, anticipating a flurry of air kisses from his acolytes.

And I expect his waspish attacks on Norfolk will draw amusement and even adulation at the dinner parties of the chattering classes, where a tasteless titbit is far more digestible than the truth.

After all, anywhere that is more than 10 minutes’ drive from the nearest Harvey Nicholls must be populated by primates who wave their fists at passing planes and drown women with warts.

Provocation is, of course, part of Mr Gill’s game. He has famously offended the people of Wales, the Isle of Man – and TV presenter Clare Balding. And I am playing into his hands by reacting to his latest divisive dispatches.

Normally I let it go, safe in the knowledge that those who do not recognise Norfolk for the beautiful, inspiring place that it is are not worth developing an ulcer over.

When defenders of the Norfolk faith attacked Steve Coogan’s Alan Partridge for mocking the county, I wished they would develop a sense of humour.

And when Jeremy Clarkson made detrimental comments about Nelson’s County, it was obvious that it was simply our turn, and not worth getting uptight about.

But Mr Gill’s comments go beyond the acceptable bounds of humour.

I’m not ever going to be a "name" in the world of journalism. But I do know that resorting to gratuitous abuse of a subject is lazy and unimaginative.

I learnt that to my cost last year when, in this column, I carelessly composed sentences that were critical of English shopkeepers. Quite rightly, rage and fury rained down upon me. I made a mental note to be more careful in future.

Unfortunately, we live in an age where being nasty gets you noticed.

Every reality TV judging panel has a Simon Cowell, a Jason Gardiner or a Craig Revel Horwood to bully and berate people. And the likes of Marco Pierre White and Gordon Ramsay gained notoriety and a fortune from being foul-mouthed.

AA Gill appears to be hewn from the same spiteful stone.

He has a privileged national platform, from which his views are read by hundreds of thousands of people. But he has chosen to abuse that position.

With dreadful hypocrisy, I tell my children: "If you have nothing nice to say, say nothing."

It is a homespun motto that Mr Gill would do well to take note of.

I predict privatised universities

Higher education is in a state of funding flux. The government has slashed teaching grants by up to 80pc, and is threatening to slaughter the sacred cash cow by limiting the number of overseas students that universities can recruit. Any extra money is meant to be coming from increased tuition fees of up to £9,000. But any institution wanting to charge between £6,000-9,000 per year will have to jump through a veritable dog agility assault course of hoops and hurdles before permission is granted.

Put yourself in the esteemed offices of those who run Oxford, Cambridge, LSE or UCL. Do they really have the will to broaden access to HE? Is it in their interests to hunt down the young people with 'potential' from poorer backgrounds, or will they prefer to continue to take the safe option of recruiting from top public schools, where straight-A* students are almost certain to settle in quickly and continue to get good grades? And, frankly, is it really fair for those who have paid £9,000 a year for the privilege of an Oxbridge education to study alongside someone with considerably less impressive A-level grades, who has had their fees subsidised as part of a social experiment? Talk about breeding resentment.

I can see only one result: 'top' universities will go private. I'm not sure how far down the line it will occur. The University of East Anglia (UEA) is a high performer, and demands strong grades from its applicants. But it is also building lasting links with its community to widen access - for example in its support and co-sponsorship of City Academy Norwich and its joint bid (with City College Norwich) to set up one of Britain's first university technical colleges. Maybe it will fall just outside the block of universities that opt out of state support.

But I am convinced that privatisation is coming for the 'elite' universities. They will then be free from government insistence on widening access and free to charge fees at whatever level the market will allow.

Leave me alone with my glass of cheap beer

I don’t like being told what to do. Ask my mum and dad, or any of my old schoolteachers.

In common with many other strong-willed (stubborn) people, I find that the one way to make me do the wrong thing is to tell me that it’s the wrong thing.

Which is why I strongly object to any attempts by the government to educate people about the dangers of alcohol – or to influence behaviour by setting a minimum price per unit.

The latest reports claim that tens of thousands of lives could be saved in the next 20 years if a minimum price of 50p per unit is introduced.

Aside from the fact that these predictions can only be speculative, would increased alcohol prices really put people off? I doubt that they would.

Petrol prices have risen at a rate of knots in recent years. But people are still filling up their tanks and driving their cars in their numbers.

By increasing the cost of alcoholic drinks, I think the government would have little or no impact on consumption rates, but could inadvertently encourage black-market booze operations to be established.

Another concern that I have is that if alcohol becomes more expensive to buy, people are less likely to drink regularly in moderation and more likely to save their precious pennies for a fortnightly binge, which is much more dangerous.

There is also the little-publicised fact that alcohol consumption in Britain has been falling every year since 2002.

That’s because people are intelligent enough to work out the risks and moderate their behaviour – without being forced to do so by people who we elected to run the country, not inspect the contents of our shopping trolleys.

Everybody knows how dangerous life can be. They make their own choices about how to respond to that, and have to live with the consequences.

I put on a seatbelt when travelling in a car because I know that it is the right thing to do – not because meddling bureaucrats tell me to.

I lock my car when I leave it unattended because I don’t want someone to nick my stereo – not because the police have come up with a punchy catchphrase.

A cheaply-made public information advert with a blindingly obvious message and the pretend-grave voice of an actor will not change my ways.

I refrain from drinking bucketloads of strong beer or spirits because I know that it is not good for me, makes me feel like death for up to 48 hours afterwards and encourages me to do things that are out of character – like smile, be sociable and dance.

In life, we learn from our mistakes.

A few pence on a bottle of cider isn’t going to put people off alcohol – any more than a lecture from mum, dad, a medic or a teacher will do the trick.

The most effective way is to find out the effects for yourself.

Cider nearly killed me once. And ever since, I cannot so much as smell the stuff without feeling nauseous. And vodka made me aggressive. As I am both a coward and totally inept at fighting, I soon gave that the cold shoulder.

Ultimately, though, I think people object to being lectured about how they live.

While there are plenty of people who drink to the point of self-destruction, the vast majority of people simply like a glass of reasonably-priced red wine or a whisky to wind down in the evening.

With the cost of living rocketing, wages stagnating and the economic outlook misty with a chance of murk, is this the time to force people to pay more for one of life’s small pleasures?