SMILE - you're on camera! Well, there are apparently more than four million security cameras in Britain now, so you'll be hard pushed to avoid them. One camera for every 14 people, so make sure you're showing your better profile.

In London, apparently, you're likely to get snapped 300 times a day - and probably not even know about it. It's not much less anywhere else in Britain

Big Brother is watching you. Well, not Big Brother actually - probably a bored security guard wondering how long it is until going home time.

The cameras are meant to prevent crime, which is a bit odd, because so often all they seem to do is actually record crime - not the same thing at all.

So we had pictures of little James Bulger on camera - but that didn't prevent him being taken away and killed. We have pictures of drunks and town centre fights and never a week goes by without pictures from inside an off-licence or post office where the cameras have caught the crime perfectly - but done nothing to prevent it.

Civil liberties groups say we should have much tighter rules governing the use of cameras. They are concerned about invasion of our privacy.

Well yes. Except that those of us who grew up in small towns - especially small Welsh towns - never knew what privacy was anyway. Every window, shop, office, school and pavement bristled with would-be spies - generally middle-aged women who were friends of our mothers. Our every move was watched, noted and reported on back to our parents who would be waiting, accusingly, when we walked in through the door. We didn't stand a chance.

But it could be worse. A friend educated in a series of fearsome convents never bats an eyelid about cameras or privacy either.

"When you've been reminded day in, day out that God watches your every move, monitors your every thought, can peer into your very soul, the idea of security cameras in Marks & Spencer is a bit of light relief really."

Keep smiling.

WHILE the arguments over top-up fees rage, maybe it's time to stop and consider what students will actually get for their money.

Back in the late 1960s and early 1970s when I, and most of the present Cabinet, was a student, we had a great deal of teaching. Lots of lectures, but also seminars, of about 12 students, weekly tutorials with about four other students and fortnightly individual tutorials where your essay was shredded methodically in front of your very eyes. Very character-forming.

On top of that there were reading groups and professor tutorials - where you never knew if you'd get a glass of sherry and an avuncular chat, or a lift on the back of a motorbike to go and see Easy Rider.

Although we were assumed to spend much of our time in independent study (ha!), we had a great deal of help, guidance and one-to-one teaching and staff, by and large, did us the great compliment of considering us their equals and listening patiently to our ideas.

But now it has turned into a production line. Students in the best rated courses at the top universities seem to get only a fraction of the actual teaching that we had and are often left to sink or swim on their own. Ask your student son or daughter when they last had an individual tutorial and wait for the baffled expression.

Maybe that's why, 35 years ago, only one person dropped out of my course while in some universities now the drop-out rate is 40 per cent.

Charging higher fees is the easy bit. The hard part will be giving value for money. Or doesn't that come into the equation?

Published: 14/01/04