As a boy, he walked into Keele University – and never left. And he counts bishops, sportsmen and politicians among his friends. So just who is Neil Baldwin?

Last weekend, Keele University celebrated Neil Baldwin’s 50th anniversary there. It was a splendid two-day affair, with speeches from distinguished alumni, a dinner, a testimonial football match, and a service of thanksgiving for his work conducted by the Bishop of Lichfield, a Keele graduate.

But Baldwin has never worked at Keele in any capacity, or been a student there, or had any formal connection with the place. He walked into the students’ union in 1960, an engaging schoolboy with learning difficulties from the local town of Newcastle-under-Lyme, and became a fixture. “I liked the campus and the chapel and the people,” he tells me on the phone.

When, four years later, Malcolm Clarke walked nervously into the students’ union on his first day at university, this stout, jovial young man ambled towards him and said: “Welcome to Keele. I’m Neil Baldwin.” Clarke says today: “I appreciated his warm welcome, but who exactly was he? As always with Neil, his exact status was unclear.”

Most Anglican bishops have met Baldwin at least once. A keen churchgoer, he turns up at their homes for tea like an old friend, and, though a little puzzled, that’s how they treat him. At a thanksgiving in the Keele chapel a few years ago for Baldwin’s work there, the visiting vicar recounted how he had first met Baldwin 20 years before, while at theological college in London. “He seemed to know all the bishops,” he said.

Clarke became the student union president in the turbulent year of 1968, when Keele students occupied the registry. Clarke opposed the action and resigned as president over it, but not before proposing Baldwin for honorary life membership of the student union. For that, at least, he got unanimous support. I too was there in the late 60s and remember Baldwin as a solid if enigmatic figure. I’m pretty sure we first met in the union bar, late at night. In 1974, Clarke became mayor of Newcastle-under-Lyme, and on the day of his inauguration, Baldwin sat beside him in the back of the mayoral Daimler, waving regally at puzzled bystanders.

As the 70s closed, Keele appointed a new vice-chancellor and Baldwin phoned Clarke, by then living in Manchester, to give him the news. “It’s Professor David Harrison of Cambridge,” he said, “and ‘e’s a very nice man.” “A very nice man” is one of Baldwin’s most frequently imitated phrases; he says it emphatically, and as though there’s a D in the middle of “very”.

“Do you know him then?” asked Clarke. “I’ve just had tea with him and his wife in Cambridge,” replied Baldwin. Clarke now says, rather carefully: “I think Professor Harrison may have been under the impression Neil was the Anglican chaplain.”

Baldwin’s Keele student friends thought he was fantasising when he talked about his friendships with Kevin Keegan, Gordon Banks, Graham Taylor and other famous footballers, until one day a well-known member of the Stoke City squad dropped him off at the student union, having given him a lift home from an away game. When Clarke met the players, they told him they knew Baldwin well – but had doubted his stories of his friendship with the mayor of Newcastle.

Eventually, Baldwin became a regular fixture on the Stoke City team coach for away matches. He makes it sound terribly simple. “I met Lou Macari [Stoke manager in the 1990s and a former Scottish international] outside the ground and we got talking. He made me the team’s kit man.” It sounds as though it can’t be true, but it’s confirmed in Macari’s autobiography, Football, My Life, which has seven pages about Baldwin. Macari treated him as a kind of mascot, getting him to dress up and sit on the touchline for the amusement and morale of his squad – once in a chicken suit, another time in full white tie and tails.

Macari, like Clarke, grew to love him. He and Baldwin were often seen together in Stoke, walking Macari’s dog. And one day in 1993, during a friendly against Aston Villa at Villa Park, Baldwin’s old friends among the Stoke supporters saw him, in full Stoke kit, warming up on the touchline. With five minutes to go in the match, Macari actually sent this rather overweight man of nearly 50 on to the pitch. The players on both sides and the referee must have been in on the plan, because Macari then had 12 players on the pitch – and the players passed the ball to Baldwin, who almost got a shot at goal.

In his autobiography Macari calls him “my best-ever signing”. Baldwin’s unselfconscious remarks were a constant source of amusement for the players, and did wonders for morale. They never paid him properly as kit man, but have now given him free entrance to Stoke games for life. Baldwin says Macari is “a very nice man”.

The late John Golding MP used to tell a story about how he walked into the House of Commons restaurant one night and saw Tony Benn, then energy secretary, at a table with Baldwin. Golding was a Keele graduate and MP for Newcastle-under-Lyme, so he knew him well. Golding was also the Labour right wing’s chief fixer, and he loathed Benn with a passion, so he left swiftly before either of them saw him. He never worked out how Baldwin had got the energy secretary to invite him to dinner.

It was quite simple. Baldwin had come to the House of Commons and put in a card for Benn saying, “Neil Baldwin from Keele – friend of Steve’s.” “Steve” was Tony Benn’s son Stephen, and Baldwin was not making it up. Like many Keele graduates, Stephen Benn keeps in touch with Baldwin to this day.

Stories about Baldwin abound, and they are almost always true. He once sold a Keele rag magazine to then prime minister Harold Wilson and buttonholed the Duke of Edinburgh for a chat about world problems. He wrote on spec to an American oarsman who was in the Cambridge boat race crew one year, and got himself on board the official launch that followed the race and into the boat-race ball afterwards.

“Neil’s complete lack of self- consciousness has made him many genuine friendships with the famous,” says Clarke. “People say he’s a fantasist, but he isn’t – he turns his fantasies into reality.”

As a young man he had an unskilled job in the pottery industry in Stoke, and in the 80s he travelled as Nello the Clown in Sir Robert Fossett’s circus. His other travels were aided by his habit of putting on a clerical collar before hitching lifts. His mother, Mary, used to worry about how he would cope after her death and sensibly made him move into his own flat; she died a few years ago, and Baldwin is managing.

People are always willing to help him, because, says Clarke “there’s not an ounce of malice in him”. Every generation of Keele students for 50 years has looked after Baldwin, and he in turn has enriched their lives with his extraordinary adventures. Generations of Keele students, including Stephen Benn, have played in the Neil Baldwin Football Club, of which he is the manager and captain, and in which he wins Player of the Year every year. Clarke calls it “a motley collection of students of the day, managed, coached, captained and kit-managed by Neil”.

Now his footballing days are probably over. He is 64 this month and will go into hospital this year to have two new hips. He may continue to train his team, though. “I’ve always been grateful to the people at Keele,” Baldwin says in his calm, gravelly voice with its strong Potteries accent. “The students have always been wonderful, they are still good friends to me.”

Baldwin’s old friend Malcolm Clarke now chairs the Football Supporters Federation and is the supporters’ representative on the Football Association council. The two meet regularly at Stoke City matches.

Clarke and Keele alumni officer John Easom want the university to give Baldwin an honorary degree, as do many Keele graduates, including me. “He has contributed a lot more to the university than most people who get honorary degrees,” says Clarke. For the moment the university establishment is resisting. Clarke has even bigger ambitions: he wants Baldwin to have an honour. He plans to petition Gordon Brown. It might just work. There could be votes in it. And it can only be a matter of time before I hear Baldwin say that “he’s a very nice man”.

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The government’s strategy has driven down standards and devalued degrees, say graduate recruiters

Labour’s target of getting 50% of young people to go to university has driven down standards and devalued degrees – and the next government should abolish it, leading graduate recruiters argued today.

The Association of Graduate Recruiters (AGR), which represents 750 employers, many of them blue-chip companies, also called for a phased increase in top-up fees. It said its proposals would force higher education institutions to be more open about the job prospects their courses offered.

The body, whose members recruit around 30,000 graduates a year, said families should be encouraged to save for university through a national savings scheme. It wants the current cap on tuition fees, which restricts them to £3,225 a year, to be gradually removed – with no limit to remain by 2020.

The AGR’s chief executive, Carl Gilleard, said: “Too many young people are left to graduate without vital employability skills. We urge all political parties to consider the practical recommendations in our manifesto – adopting them would have huge benefits for the economy and help to reaffirm the value of a degree.

“We know that some of these calls to action – particularly those which relate to funding and finance – are unlikely to receive a universal welcome. After careful consideration, however, we have concluded that this package of measures is the best way to drive up standards in higher education, provide a better return on investment for students and parents, and ensure the UK remains competitive in a global knowledge economy.”

The report called for “employability skills” to be embedded in all degree courses, more high-quality work experience for students before and during university, better careers advice, and the introduction of a “higher education achievement report” alongside degree classifications, to measure and record student development.

A review into the future of fees, headed by Lord Browne, will not report back until after the general election, and both Labour and the Tories have refused to state a position on raising the cap.

The National Union of Students (NUS) branded the AGR’s proposals offensive. Its president, Wes Streeting, said: “The AGR does not seem to appreciate how much its own members benefit from our higher education system. It is in the long-term interest of our economy that the number of highly skilled graduates entering our workforce continues to increase.

“At a time when students are leaving university with record levels of debt, and graduate job prospects are at an all time low, it is offensive to argue that the cap on fees should be raised at all, let alone lifted entirely.

“The vast majority of the general public is against higher fees. If the cap on fees were scrapped, a disastrous market in higher education would open up, which would see poorer students priced out of more prestigious universities, and other students and universities consigned to the ‘bargain basement’. This would be a disaster for UK higher education and must not be allowed to happen.”

The University and College Union (UCU) said the report was out of touch. The union’s general secretary, Sally Hunt, said: “The future for the UK is at the forefront of a high-skilled knowledge economy – and we won’t get there with less graduates. The three main beneficiaries of higher education have been identified as the state, the individual and the employer, yet only two of them are picking up the bill.

It is time that business started to make a proper contribution to university funding, instead of parroting its siren calls to increase the debt of students and the burden on hardworking families struggling in tough economic times.”

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Lucy Neville-Rolfe attacks the quality of education received by many of the young Britons recruited by the retailer

A main board director of Tesco will today attack the quality of school-leavers and the standards achieved by A-level students and university graduates.

Lucy Neville-Rolfe, the retailer’s director of corporate and legal affairs, says school-leavers have basic problems with literacy and numeracy and that many also have “what you might call an attitude problem”. She adds: “They don’t seem to understand the importance of a tidy appearance and have problems with timekeeping … Some seem to think that the world owes them a living.”

Neville-Rolfe also says: “There are growing questions over various aspects of our exam system.” She adds that grade inflation makes it difficult to identify the highest achievers: “There seems to be a fair amount of evidence now that [exams] are getting easier and failing to stretch people. The proportion of firsts and 2:1s has risen enormously so it’s much rarer to get a 2:2 than a first. People who are clever today are achieving the grades of the very clever a couple of decades ago.”

Tesco is the largest private sector employer in the country, with 280,000 UK employees, and Neville-Rolfe, 56, is one of the most powerful and well paid women in British business. An Oxford graduate and former civil service high-flyer before joining Tesco, her total pay package last year was more than £1.6m.

Her broadside, in a speech to be delivered at a London conference, is the second time in under six months that Tesco has publicly criticised the education system and the quality of school-leavers. Last October, the grocer’s chief executive, Sir Terry Leahy, said: “Despite all the money that has been spent, standards are still woefully low in too many schools. Employers like us … are often left to pick up the pieces.”

His comments were echoed by Richard Lambert, director general of the CBI, which represents business leaders and by Sir Stuart Rose, chairman of Marks & Spencer. Rose said millions of school-leavers were unfit for work because: “They cannot do reading. They cannot do arithmetic. They cannot do writing.” Lambert said the education system was failing poorer children and producing “exam results we ought to be ashamed of”.

Neville-Rolfe, says part of the problem is that there are too many agencies and oversight bodies and too much paperwork: “Our education system seems very complicated to me. I would guess that the paperwork mountain with which teachers have to struggle is even worse than the red tape we face in business. There are lots of agencies and bodies, often issuing reams of instructions to teachers. It isn’t surprising if teachers sometimes get distracted from the most important task at hand: teaching children well in the classroom.”

She says Tesco store managers are the “equivalent of a headteacher in a school” and that senior supermarket staff would make good school governors.

Heads should also be given more power and rewarded better. “Why don’t we give heads and teachers more freedom to take responsibility and use their professional judgment?”

She also points to wider problems among the young and their attitudes to work, authority and discipline: “The truth is that a certain humility and an ability to work hard are important for success … More broadly, a society where people don’t feel the need to work to gain material possessions will not be a stable or successful society.”

In her speech to the Institute of Grocery Distribution’s conference on skills, she says that education “is set to be an important point of debate at the general election” and that the supermarket industry should come up with a “manifesto for education and skills which we can give to whoever wins”.

The government and teaching unions have repeatedly dismissed the attacks by business leaders on educational standards, pointing out that they have never been higher.

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Forget a government-funded college - we need our own profession to create a institution led by, and accountable to, social workers, says Hilton Dawson

The 12,500 members of the British Association of Social Workers (BASW) are being urged to give a resounding “yes” vote in a referendum next month on the organisation’s proposal to create a UK College of Social Work.

We want to transform our profession by creating an independent college to which all 105,000 social workers in the UK will be offered free registration. The college would set its own high standards for entry to the profession, accredit continuing professional development, license all employers of social workers, and set standards for a social work career structure.

This is in stark contrast to the rather puny suggestions of the Social Work Taskforce, which recommended a government-funded college that would give a stronger voice to social work, exercise influence over policy-making, and help improve public understanding of social work.

What we need from the government is not interference or money, but the legislation and the amendments to statutory guidance that would embed the college in critical decision-making about entry to the profession, training, professional development, the fitness of employers, and a career structure that retains the best qualified, most experienced social workers in social work practice.

We need devolved governments that will recognise the critical importance of social work to people’s lives – that they are just as good as doctors, nurses, teachers and police officers. But, above all, we need our own profession to create a college led by, and accountable to, social workers.

This is not a case of the BASW taking over anything. It is a bold and historic move, but it is also a moment of considerable humility. It is the BASW putting our democracy, our organisation, our resources, our 40 years of experience, our skills and our international standing at the disposal of all social workers. Now is the time to take our profession into our own hands in order to take it forward.

If we do that together, we will transform the profession, ensuring that people can have great careers doing the best work in the world, and ensuring that social work serves people very well.

All we are doing is what every other successful and highly regarded profession would do. There is no other profession that would accept the government creating a college for it.

We reject criticism of “going it alone” because we want all organisations with social work members to join, in association with the BASW and, hopefully, with the college. We will ensure a UK college works with all governments and organisations in the best interests of social work.

To those who whisper that the BASW isn’t up to it, we point to a growing membership and, as a consequence, independence, financial sustainability and coherent investment plans. We have access to world-class resources, and knowledge about the highest international standards of practice.

And as for those who say this is too bold, it remains to be seen whether the BASW members will support their own council and whether social workers will join their own college. My view is that support for a college is a compelling matter of professional and personal pride. This is such an important time for social work that we can hardly be too bold.

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Prenuptial training for young people aims to tackle country’s rising divorce rates

There was a time when Iranian women seeking husbands prioritised job status and financial security – not to mention love – at the top of their list of needs.

Now potential suitors face the prospect of having to fulfil a daunting new requirement before asking for a bride’s hand – having the right government certificate.

Acquiring the appropriate official qualifications before popping the question is part of a plan for prenuptial training courses approved by the Iranian president, Mahmoud Ahmadinejad, with the aim of reversing declining Iranian marriage rates and rising divorce statistics.

From next week, online courses will be offered to young people to prepare them for the pitfalls of married life. The three-month courses, involving weekly tests, will be run by the state-governed national youth organisation, and those who successfully complete them will receive a certificate as proof of their readiness for matrimony. Mohsen Zanganeh, the head of the national youth organisation for Tehran province, said the courses would provide young people with an understanding of the “alphabet of life” and were intended as an essential gateway to marriage.

“We intend that within the next two years, if a boy attempts to woo a girl, she will answer only if he has finished his course,” he told the Fars news agency. “We are trying to increase the level of information among young people concerning marriage.”

Zangeneh said the course would run along similar lines to a universityand have a panel of 40 experts serving as its scientific board. The idea has been partly prompted by the rising divorce rate.

Iranian decision-makers are also alarmed at a rise in the average marrying age, which scientists say is leading to an increase in premarital sex and abortions arising from unwanted pregnancies.

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