It's not so grim oop north...

So then, I'm back from Sheffield - and I was right: it was a real shock to the system.

But not in the way I imagined. I was hugely impressed by both Sheffield the city and the University of Sheffield.

My last visit to Sheffield was around 20 years ago, maybe more - and my recollections were not good. It was, not to put too fine a point on it, a sh*thole!

I was expecting boarded up mills and steelworks. But it was nothing of the sort. Maybe Mrs Thatcher was right in shutting down all the indigenous industries of the north ... no of course she wasn't.

Now, however, it seems a splendid city. Much has been done to it and I felt much safer walking around it yesterday than I do when I return to my home city of Portsmouth.

While that is a sad indictment on poor old Pompey, it's also a compliment to the former steel city. James, my eldest step-son, was also hugely impressed. He may even choose to study there.

If I had to live in a northern city - heaven forbid - I could certainly do much worse than choose Sheffield. The only problem I had with it - speaking as a chap of some girth - is those seven bloody hills!

A little bit of politics there . . .

Thirty years ago I left school at 16. I would have given anything to go to university and further my education but, like many working-class kids, I needed to bring money into the house.

That and the fact that, with three O levels, I probably wasn’t bright enough.

Many of my friends have found success professionally despite doing the same as I did. Some work in the City. Some edit newspapers or magazines. And they got there without the benefit of a university education.

For in those days only the elite got to university. Not the elite in the form of the middle and upper classes, but the elite in terms of intelligence. The really bright ones. The people who could quite easily see a career as a doctor or a scientist ahead of them.

The problem these days is that the Government has lost sight of what they really should be trying to achieve.

The aim should be to offer every child, from whatever background, access to a top-quality education to determine – and this is the crux – whether they are bright enough to warrant a place at university.

Instead, university places have been belittled by opening them up to people who, quite simply, shouldn’t be there. People whose academic achievement in my day would have been a slightly dodgy looking ashtray made in metalwork – or resistant materials as I believe it’s called nowadays.

Now, they saddle themselves with debt in order to study a subject which previously was the preserve of the specialist round in Mastermind – Graffiti during the French Renaissance or some such – only to end up doing the same job they would have found themselves in if they’d worked their way up from the IT equivalent of the shop-floor.

If we really are concerned about tuition fees and the debts incurred by students, let’s make university places a privilege not a right.

There are colleges out there where you can study things like the ‘Philosophical Use of the Internal Combustion Engine 1930-1934’ and you probably don’t have to leave home to study it.

More and more I’m becoming convinced that going to university is, for many, just a jolly and a chance to live a riotous lifestyle among like-minded hedonists.

Instead it should be the first step to being an asset to the country and the community – that way we won’t have to worry about tuition fees and student debt to the same extent.