Jamie Oliver saves money but loses all sense of time On the other hand, it did seem to be the same children causing trouble again and again, so maybe being reasonable, consistent, patient and fair doesn't work. Maybe for a trial period - say, from now till half-term - it would be worth giving unreasonable, inconsistent, impatient and unfair a go. Then, from half-term till Christmas, irrational, unstable, vengeful and despotic. Just to be sure they've tried all the options. An evidence-based approach, with rigorous analysis of the respective outcomes. I'm sure parents would support it. Like Educating Essex, its 2011 predecessor, Educating Yorkshire is a fly-on-the-wall series filmed in a state secondary school: in this case, Thornhill Community Academy in Dewsbury. It's a fascinating programme. The camera spends most of its time following Mr Mitchell, the headmaster. He comes across well: firm, authoritative, but also kind and funny. Not all his pupils agree, though. We heard one girl complain to a friend because he'd threatened to put them in "isolation" (working alone in silence) for smoking. Her verdict: "It's about him thinking he can do what he f------ wants." There were no teachers present when she said this, which was a pity, because I'd have liked to hear one say, "Well, yes, he does think he can do what he wants. And the reason he thinks he can do what he wants is that he CAN do what he wants. Because he's THE HEADMASTER, and the point about being headmaster - i.e., the person IN CHARGE of THE ENTIRE SCHOOL - is that you can do what you want. Unless what you want to do is to throttle surly teenagers who have a wildly inflated sense of entitlement. Sadly you can't do that. Bloody regulations. But then I watched Mum and Dad Are Splitting Up and felt a bit guilty. Shown the same night on BBC Two, it was a documentary in which teenagers were interviewed about their parents" divorces. A third of children in Britain today live with only one parent. It made for one of the most uncomfortable hours I've spent watching TV. It was bad enough seeing a child stop short, overcome by tears, but it was even worse seeing one talk as if she didn't miss her dad and didn't think of him as her dad any more anyway. And then the awful scenes in which a child and his or her parents were interviewed together, and the parents would disagree over some detail, and the child without looking at them would tell them sharply to stop it, just stop it, as if the child were the parent and the parents were children. The parents were interviewed individually, too. If anything, their interviews were even more uncomfortable than their children's. Man: "I'm quite old-fashioned. Too many times in this day and age, people think getting married is like buying a new pair of jeans. But for me marriage is something very solid. It's very important to me. Interviewer, politely: "It wasn't so important that you could stay in it, though."