The witty way to teach girls to stand up to men

Trying to get your daughter into the right secondary school is a daunting task for any parent. There are long hours spent researching possibilities, scouring the internet and worrying about league tables, pastoral care and much more.

Some parents have no choice but to accept what they are offered, of course. But everyone wants their child to be happy, to excel — and to emerge sufficiently robust to cope with the tough, male- dominated outside world.

none of them will be concerned with whether their darling can do a comedy routine on stage. yet that is the skill headmistress nina gunson is encouraging her pupils to learn, offering them an eight-week course of stand-up classes.

Hard-pressed parents who scrimped and saved the £13,359-a-year fees for her establishment, Sheffield High School For girls, must think she’s having a laugh.

in fact, though, there is a brilliant logic to Mrs gunson’s apparent lunacy. What do almost all young women suffer from? Lack of confidence, especially in a public forum.

in an age when teenagers are judged on looks and by their selfies and ‘likes’, there is great sense in empowering girls with the ability to just stand up and be who they are.

Mrs gunson says the point of the course is to take teenagers out of their comfort zone by having them perform in front of each other, so they can be assessed on ingenuity, humour and the ability to think on their feet.

We all have a funny side, it’s just that we don’t know it. And as Mrs gunson says, the course ‘teaches students to not take themselves too seriously, to improvise, to take risks and be a little bolder’.

it also provides lessons in how to cope with terrifying social situations — dealing with an audience when the jokes fall flat, heckling, a rising sense of panic in the public glare.

The head’s view is that if you can learn to handle all this, you’ll be better able to manage stressful situations in work and life.

And remember, some girls make scintillating comic performers. That’s how Phoebe Waller-Bridge started out, before creating Fleabag and Killing Eve, and contributing to the script for the next James Bond movie.

We can’t all be Fleabags but that doesn’t matter. nina gunson’s point is that you just have to learn to be confident in yourself.

FINALLY divorced this summer, Paul Hollywood, 53, first had an affair with Marcela Valladolid, his fellow judge on a U.S. version of Bake Off, then moved on to 24-year- old barmaid Summer Monteys-Fullam, who dumped him last