HELMETS are happening. Schools in Phuket City are rapidly giving students a head-start in life by protecting their brains at the same time as they fill them with useful information.

Colonel Wanchai Eakporntip, superintendent of Phuket City police station, was almost as welcome as the two big-headed and big-hearted mascot policemen when they visited Phuket's Piboonsawasdee Municipal School yesterday to sign a memo of understanding.

The school is undertaking the MoU to ensure that every student wears a helmet, and to tell parents if kids turn up at school without one.

While the campaign to enforce the wearing of helmets in Phuket City is being hailed as a huge success - at least during daylight hours - most needless pain and economic damage will be saved if the next generation goes through life always wearing a helmet on a motorcycle.

Colonel Wanchai, who masterminded the use of safety films and community involvement to create the ''Phuket helmet campaign model'' that is now being taken up elsewhere in Thailand, understands the need to win the hearts, minds, and heads of schoolchildren.

While tearaway teeners can still be seen motorcycling on the streets without helmets, that's not likely to last for much longer.

High school, tech school and college students now have road safety incorporated in their social science studies - and the police send lists of those caught without helmets to the (appropriately-titled) headmasters and head mistresses.

So no helmet, no head-start to studies. Get caught more than once, and you lose actually marks.

''Helmets are now popular with kids,'' said the Piboonsawasdee Municipal School headmaster as children swarmed to touch the rolly-polly police mascots. ''Now they want to do it.''

The school now has shelves and hanging space set aside for schoolbags AND for helmets.

And the tragic tales of tourists trapped in Thai hospitals should be enough to persuade visitors, too, to wear helmets and take out holiday insurance.

Colonel Wanchai is visiting one school or more each week as the revolutionary Phuket campaign turns heads all over town.

Phuketwan supports Mothers or Motorcycles, (MoM) an action group that has helped to drive awareness of the need for helmets on motorcycles and other road safety issues.