AND you wonder why bosses despair… Some 30,000 teenagers are to be allowed to lie in bed later in the mornings and start school at 10am, or even 11am in the case of sixth formers.

The £1m experiment will run in 20 schools and among the people involved is Paul Kelly, head of Monkseaton High on Tyneside where a similar experiment improved absenteeism and raised academic standards. Fantastic.

So now the world has to fit round a snoring adolescent who was probably up half the night anyway.

Meanwhile, back in the real world, the employers’ organisation, the CBI is complaining, yet again, that school leavers lack the right skills and attitude for the world of work.

The Association of Graduate Recruiters also reports that they have a great many more jobs on their books this year – but not enough suitably qualified graduates to fill them. Many of those too, lack the right attitude.

Is there any wonder?

Schools, keen to improve their exam results and standing in the league tables, might think it’s a cunning wheeze to pander to the ways of teenagers. And as the mother of a lad who was the world’s doziest paperboy. Ever. I don’t underestimate the problem of getting them out of bed, into the shower and at school on time.

But it has to be done. Schools might fit round teenagers, but work won’t. I know teenagers’ brains really do work differently and they would happily live in totally different time zones from the rest of us – all the more reason to get them trained up ASAP.

There is more to education than exam results and getting up in time with the right attitude is a pretty important part of that training.

The sooner a sleepy teenager learns that that the world won’t wait for them, the better.

Buy them an alarm clock and help them wake up. It might even help them grow up too.

PEACHES Geldof was bright and talented and seemed to thrive on motherhood, writing and tweeting at almost every possible moment about her two sons and family life and how happy it made her.

But it wasn’t enough. After struggling to come off her dependency on drugs, she died, just like her mother, of a heroin overdose, leaving her 11-month-old son alone in the house with her body.

It’s all desperately sad. But it wasn’t inevitable. She wasn’t doomed to end like her mother. It could have been different.

And let’s hope that for her small bereaved sons, it will be.

THE price of failure means that Tesco boss Philip Clarke, under whose leadership profits slumped and share prices fell, will probably get a leaving package worth £10million.

Ah well, every little helps...

At that price, don’t you wish you could be a failure too?