WE ARE meant to be raising children, not battery hens. A new £46m 'super school' has been built without a playground. Children will have organised sports, but there will be no break in the day apart from a mere 30 minutes for lunch.

Which probably makes your working conditions seem pretty perfect.

With wonderfully supreme confidence, the headmaster says: "Pupils will not need to let off steam because they will not be bored."

What - not even after double maths on a hot and sunny day? Gosh.

True, secondary school students do not have the same need for playtime as younger children. Junior school pupils need a chance to get out into the fresh air, to run wild, jump, shout and work off surplus energy.

The new school will have 2,200 pupils - tricky to supervise, hard to control bullying or the casual misery of so many playgrounds. So you can understand, I suppose, why they're not even going to try.

Yet even in secondary school boys, especially, could do with a chance for a bit of exercise, kick a ball about, get the muscles going.

But school is about much more than working and passing exams. And playtime - even for idle teenagers, is about much more than exercise, more than playing.

Apart from a few keen first years eagerly playing tennis or running round the netball court, I think virtually every girl in my grammar school spent their lunch hours and breaks desperately trying to get out of that nice healthy fresh air and sneak back into school to slouch in the damp and smelly cloakroom, swapping gossip and lipsticks and endlessly re-styling our hair. The smell of wet coats swirled headily with clouds of cheap hair spray as we squashed ourselves in between the pegs.

At the next door school, the boys lurked at the bottom of the rugby fields, smoking cheap cigarettes and sharing much thumbed soft-porn mags.

Playtime? We would have been much healthier without it.

But while we were failing so profoundly to get any fresh air or exercise, we were learning other things - and not just the art of backcombing or that cheap lipstick makes your lips itch.

We learnt vital social skills, put the world to rights, chewed over our attitudes to sex, marriage, abortion, potential careers, the Vietnam War and whether American tan tights under white ankle socks was a really cheap look.

Because of the lack of space, those stuffy playtimes and lunch hours among the coats and shoe bags were the only time in school that all the different cliques were forced to mix and talk to each other. The things I learnt from some of the more worldly-wise.

Today's children are already increasingly isolated in front of their solitary computer screens. School is their best chance to meet and talk freely with friends and contemporaries.

It would be a shame if they would miss out on a chance to socialise not just with their friends, but also with people they might not normally mix with - even if it has to be in a stuffy cloakroom.

Those breaks were, in the widest sense, very educational and a vital part of growing up.

And much more fun than double maths.