The best teacher I ever had wasn’t really a teacher at all. For most of his career he had a proper job – well, if you count being a journalist as proper – and had only been tempted to run a postgraduate course in his latter years to give the next generation the benefit of his experience.

And for us up-and-coming journalists, that was what made him such a good teacher. He had only recently departed the newsroom of a national newspaper, and knew exactly what it was like. He told us stories that inspired us to want to follow in his footsteps – and told us about the mistakes he’s made along the way. He might not have had much experience of teaching, but he gave exactly the kind of advice that we all wanted to hear.

The best vocational teachers are like that. If you want to learn how to be a nurse, a mechanic, a fireman, a carpet-fitter, or even an HR professional, it’s best to listen to people who have done the job. And because it’s a fast-changing world, ideally you want to listen to somebody who has done the job recently, not 20 years ago.

But when you start talking about academic qualifications rather than vocational ones, it’s a different kettle of fish. The lecturers who are most respected in universities are people who are immersed in theory. They have spent decades tied up in books and research and, in the eyes of most academics, that is what makes them worth listening to.

It’s this contrast that comes to mind whenever I hear the view (frequently expressed by the government) that there should be more vocational skills taught at university.

Many university courses are taught with a vocational slant, even the often-derided media studies could be a great success if they were to be taught by people like my old journalism tutor, ie. people who have got their hands dirty in the real world. But too often they aren’t, because they’re set up and run by academic people in an academic environment, they lose touch with the job they are supposedly teaching students to do.

And the sad thing is that, since cash is king in this world of tuition fees, these failing courses are judged not by the number of students they get into jobs but by the number of paying punters they attract.

The last time I heard from my journalism tutor he had given up teaching his postgraduate course. Maybe I got in there at the right time.