I'm glad the Great Yarmouth Charter Academy has so many rules – the kids will be well prepared for their exchange trip to North Korea

It’s always exciting to witness inventive ways of teaching children. That’s why it’s invigorating to see a new charter of discipline imposed by the Great Yarmouth Academy, which includes rules such as insisting the children smile – and if they don’t manage it, “they will be punished”.

The school was failing, but this should sort it. Once a few volts are put through their genitals, the kids will learn not to gaze into the middle distance with an air of melancholy.

Presumably the people who came up with this plan say: “When I was a boy, if you looked wistful and contemplative instead of smiling, the teacher came round your house and put down your favourite pet and it never did me any harm.”

The Academy has hit upon an important point, which is that making people smile is hard. The old laborious method was to create a welcoming atmosphere and a prospect of possible fun, but it’s much quicker to yell: “SMILE, you bastard, or you’ll be dragged to the isolation room and made to memorise the Latin for plants.”

This could be a boost for comedians; instead of wasting hours writing jokes, we’ll put a sign on the door saying: “Anyone not laughing will be taken to the basement and told: ‘Most of all you’ve let YOURSELF down’ and forced to do algebra.”

Even more imaginative is the Academy’s rule that “Sick children will be handed a bucket in which to vomit, rather than allowed to leave the classroom”.

The reason for the new rules, according to the school, is that “students need the right environment in which to learn and succeed”. And what creates a better environment in which to learn and succeed than the person next to you chucking up in a bucket?

Imaginative teachers can incorporate the sick into the lesson, saying: “It’s 45 centimetres wide and 23 centimetres long, so who can tell me how we work out the total area of Nathan’s puke?”

But schools are in competition with eachother now, so other schools will try to get ahead of Great Yarmouth by making kids go to toilet in a bucket as well – which will not only create a fun environment for learning, but will also allow those schools to sell off their toilets to developers so they can be turned into flats.

Instead of the old trick of wangling out of lessons by having to go the dentist, in Great Yarmouth the dentist will take your tooth out in the classroom as you’re memorising the wives of Henry VIII.

One girl at the school says she was told retractable pens were no longer allowed, as they click and become distracting. This is why the kids will need to be sent on a special course where they learn to be sick in a bucket silently.

In music, they should imagine the notes rather than banging and blowing things, which makes a dreadful racket while you’re trying to learn about notes and keys, and they should play football with a ball of wool so they can concentrate quietly.

This is certain to work, because if you look at anyone who’s ever done anything successful, it’s always because they were told to smile or be punished and vomit in a bucket. When Einstein came up with the theory of relativity, it was because he was in a lesson about time and energy with a teacher going: “Explain the constant speed of light relative to your own speed, boy, and do it NOW.” His original equation was “E=MC thank you sir I’ll fetch a mop and clean up my own sick sir, thank you sir.”

And you never caught Van Gogh forgetting to smile, or Virginia Woolf or Churchill or Tony Hancock or Beethoven.

Some people have criticised the new approach from the Academy (and at least 20 families have taken their kids out of the school), but I believe they’ve taken a modern approach that should be encouraged.

For example, less ambitious schools see the novels of Charles Dickens as stories to enlighten our understanding of a brutal time, but this school understands them as training manuals for a modern society. Their next document will insist: “The children shall pick the pockets of folk in the towns and hand the stolen wares to the headmaster.”

In any case, the head of this school is only following the demands of the Government in recent years to make education entirely about passing exams, and not to be distracted from that noble aim by mentioning something that might be vaguely interesting or enjoyable.

And this will prepare students for the challenges they’ll face as adults, when they’re forced to falsely smile all day at Pret a Manger or Marks and Spencer, asking every customer: “How has your day been today?” as if they’re genuinely interested, even though you could answer, “I was diagnosed with leprosy” and they’d stare into the middle distance and reply: “Well, have a nice day.”

But this latest method of schooling should also result in fascinating trips abroad for the Great Yarmouth kids – they’ll all be prepared for an exchange trip with North Korea.

They’ll happily sit up straight in a classroom in Pyongyang, smiling and declaring they’d throw up in a bucket all day rather than miss their master’s tips on how to calculate the area of a circle, and when the North Koreans come back to Great Yarmouth they’ll complain they want to go back home where it’s more relaxed, and they’ll all wonder what happened to the boy who had a retractable pen and was taken out and never seen again.