Jim-jams jettisoned

All of society’s great developments begin in our education system. Experts say the top trends for the coming year are obesity, filming attacks on strangers with mobile phones and stealing copyrighted material - and guess what? They all started in education.

Colleges, of course, are at the forefront of many social changes. And so it has proved with this latest development: All-Day Pyjama Syndrome (ADPS).

It hit the headlines after Tesco in Cardiff banned customers who couldn’t be bothered to get dressed from shuffling around in their Spongebob SquarePants PJs.

Commentators traced the trend back to St Matthew’s Primary School in Belfast, where the head was forced to appeal to parents picking their kids up from school to change out of their nightwear.

But whatever schools can do, colleges can do better: according to Robin Livingstone, who coined the term ADPS, a student at Belfast Institute of Further and Higher Education was working on a dissertation on the phenomenon back in 2006. Nice to see the rest of the world catching up.

Going down for heir

FErret is not exactly clear on the terms of Royal Warrants of Appointment, but Blackpool and The Fylde College may now be able to claim one.

The college was favoured with a visit from Prince William last week, and not for the usual fixed-grin, have-you-come-far affair either: he was there to train.

The Royal Air Force uses the college’s Fleetwood Nautical Campus for part of its helicopter training, which meant the most academically successful heir to the throne ever - mind, it’s not a competitive field - was going to spend time among the common folk in FE, like Shakespeare’s Henry V before Agincourt.

The college notes that the prince “successfully passed” a Helicopter Underwater Escape Training Course. Thank God for that: drowning the second in line to the throne would probably not do much good for FE’s reputation, on balance.