Prince proud as champion of traditions

The Prince's Teaching Institute (PTI) was launched as a series of summer schools aimed at inspiring teachers to introduce pupils to more challenging material.

Across the country 194 departments in 126 schools have been awarded the PTI's Schools Programme Mark, which recognises the development of inspirational ideas to enhance teaching of English, history, geography, maths and science.

The Prince said yesterday: "All of a sudden, in the 1960s, anything which might conceivably be described as a timeless principle was abandoned on the basis that all we had known and learned had suddenly become irrelevant, old-fashioned, out-of-date and definitely not modern. Frankly, I thought this was bonkers and likely to end in tears."

Prince Charles helped create a series of summer schools which provided a forum for teachers to discover new ways of teaching traditional subjects.