First, because just a few minutes in a personal and social education lesson would remind them of why we need speed cameras. More than 1,000 people are killed each year and more than 12,000 seriously injured in speed-related accidents on British roads. According to the Royal Society for the Prevention of Accidents, speeding drivers are to blame for one in three road crashes.

If ministers had heard the accident doctor who visits school sixth forms, they would know that nine out of 10 pedestrians hit by a car will be killed, and that a car travelling at 35 miles per hour is twice as likely to kill someone as a car travelling at 30 miles per hour. And that however many times you may have had to do it, there is no easy way to tell someone that their son, daughter or partner has been killed and will never return home again.

I had barely joined my first school when five former pupils still in their teens were killed in a high-speed car crash. I knew none of them, but I was moved by the image of the young former captain of the football team being laid in his coffin in the team’s strip: the happiness of his football days had made this final choice of outfit easy for his devastated parents. Had ministers been there when the tragic news reached school, they would have seen grown men weep.

As speeding drivers wreck lives, so do school bullies. A key way of reducing bullying is to reduce opportunities for it to take place - by training staff, for example, to spot extortion in the lunch queue at 50 yards. By ensuring that staff duty is well co-ordinated so that pupils never know which teacher may come around the corner at a given moment. In short, guaranteeing that there is a high likelihood that the bully will be caught. Bullies, of course, also need to know that sanctions are stringent because bullying will not be tolerated.

Speeding appears far less serious than bullying, but it wrecks lives nonetheless. As the former transport minister Lord Macdonald said, we need to make speeding as socially unacceptable as we have made drink-driving in the past 10 years. Effective teachers know that you should not try to be pupils’ friends. Ministers need to know that you cannot make speeding unacceptable if you appease drivers by making it obvious where speed cameras are. I am ashamed to say that despite paying far more heed to reducing my speed than I used to, I am still one of the two-thirds of drivers who exceed the speed limit at some time. But I also know that the possible presence of hidden speed cameras improves my road behaviour when my self-discipline is lacking.

The Guardian columnist Simon Hoggart recently wrote about a young girl at his daughter’s school who died after being hit by a motorbike on the fast and busy road on which the school is situated. Surely the life of a child, he wrote, is worth more than the few seconds saved as each driver hurtles towards the next tailback. Ministers might like to contemplate the thought that each day they continue to appease speeding drivers another three lives are lost to people travelling too fast in cars.

tony elston Tony Elston teaches at Urmston grammar school, Manchester