Mark Andrews on Saturday: Trams, trains, and the Highway Code

Admittedly, only by a car leasing firm which I am not going to give free publicity to, but nevertheless some people seem to be taking the suggestion seriously.

Don’t teachers have enough on their plate? Only last week schools were told they must start teaching children about transgenderism. Now they're expected to prepare them for the driving test as well.

Meanwhile, the number of children sitting GCSE languages has fallen by 45 per cent since 2002.This is even more pronounced for French and German, with numbers down by about two thirds. And this is the generation supposed to be unashamedly pro-European, wanting closer ties with our neighbours.

Schools will argue the decline of French and German is in part due to a wider range of languages on offer, and there is a 22 per cent rise in the number of youngsters taking Welsh. But, no disrespect to the Welsh, how is that going to get you a job?

OF course, the teaching of languages in schools has always been a bit patchy. I actually thought scraping O-level German and a smattering of French made me multilingual, a delusion emphatically debunked at the Birmingham Christmas market about 10 years ago. It probably didn’t help that the guy I was talking to was Romanian, but you get my point.

I remember my teacher saying it didn’t matter how ridiculous your answers to questions were, as long as they were in good German. So when asked to give account of an important event in my community, I described in great detail a street party and disco to celebrate my grandfather’s 120th birthday, attended by the mayor who presented him with a Vauxhall car. It got decent marks, if I remember rightly.

The point is, though, in today’s multi-national world, being fluent in foreign languages can be a great asset in business. Not just the stilted textbook speak we all learned, but understanding the language, the idioms and colloquialisms that real people use. Our education system would do far better focusing on this than gimmicks like the Highway Code.

LAST week I questioned whether extending the Metro tramline to the Merry Hill centre really would regenerate Dudley, after a councillor bizarrely claimed it was ‘a town on the up’.

Now we are told the scheme is going to cost £106 million more than we were told last year, and that it will cost the taxpayer a staggering £440 million. A cynic might think we were being softened up.

The proposed extension will run for 6.8 miles, so the cost equates to about £1,021 an inch. Who’s in charge of the costings, Chris Grayling?

To be fair, it is substantially less than the £2,500 an inch being spent on the 350-yard extension linking the Metro to Wolverhampton bus station, and the £2,678 an inch for HS2. But it still seems extortionate for something only marginally quicker than a bus, and as far as I can see its only effect will be to make it slightly easier for people to desert our town centres for out-of-town shopping. Let’s just say that the South Yorkshire tram link to Meadowhall shopping centre has yet to turn Rotherham into a thriving metropolis.

Surely the time has come to abandon this wasteful, disruptive and very old-fashioned project before it is too late – and instead use the £440 million to reopen the railway line, reconnecting the Black Country to rest of Britain.