Anyone who has been in education for a few years knows that a problem can blow up with frightening suddenness, even in the best run schools. For years such hiccups were resolved locally, with little fuss. Since education became a high-stakes policy area any disturbance of the norm is seen as a tragedy, a potential front-page headline.

With eight million children and 400,000 teachers in 24,000 primary and secondary schools, there are bound to be incidents on a daily basis. From time to time during the school year a pupil will get into a rage, a parent will remonstrate, a teacher will burn out, a head will spread marmalade on national test papers or turn up to assembly in a Batman outfit. The more pathetic of our journalists and politicians will then portray the abnormal as the normal.

Before long a well-rehearsed ritual swings into action. Local and national reporters doorstep the school, screwing quotes out of anyone, authoritative or not. The BBC programme Panorama hired a massive crane to shoot film directly through windows of the troubled Ridings School, with no indication of the context of what was being shown, beyond speculation.

Individual headteachers, people like Bill Stubbs who chair national organisations, even the Secretary of State herself, are persecuted, or hounded out of their jobs. A few years ago Bob Salisbury, a Nottingham head, was vilified by the tabloids for accepting restaurant vouchers, so that pupils who had done well in work or attendance could take their parents out for a meal.

It was probably the only way these not especially wealthy pupils could give their family a treat, but the head was wrongly accused of offering them booze, because the meal would have been in a perfectly respectable chain of pub restaurants. Yet they would have been expressly forbidden to consume alcohol. Fortunately Bob had the last laugh when he was knighted.

People are normally selected for senior posts on the basis of their professional competence, not their ability to cope with lies and fabrications. Perhaps this needs to change, so I have devised a new personality test, called Screening Out Deficient Or Feeble Flappers, specially designed to identify the tough-minded. SODOFF is guaranteed to find those robust characters who can cheerfully take on a senior post and weather the inevitable storms.

1 During a parents’ evening a teacher in your school says to a father “Bog off, you thick git”. Do you: a) say to the parent “He’s a laugh, isn’t he?”

b) crawl c) congratulate the teacher on his discernment?

2 A journalist rings to say some of your pupils are selling drugs outside the school gate. Do you: a) say “I hope they’re not undercutting the tuckshop” b) promise to use rack and thumbscrews on the offenders c) calculate how many teachers’ bonus payments could be funded by a percentage of the takings?

3 An Ofsted team tells you that the school is likely to be put into special measures. Do you say: a) “Special measures? You mean pints and gallons, that sort of thing?”

b) “I may not be back for some time”, and then turn on your heel and plummet head first from the top of the school c) “Is that bloke Woodhead still with you? Decent sort, I always thought”?

4 Five teachers threaten to resign unless a key vacant post is filled soon. Do you: a) tell them that, as there is no money left in the budget, a whip round will be necessary and a grand each should do it b) burst into tears and offer to teach the programme yourself c) say “A vacant post in your department? I wonder anyone noticed”?

5 A pupil burns the school down one night. Do you: a) Ask staff if there are any government lesson plans and tickbox sheets they would like to add to the pyre b) rush to assist the firefighters, even offering to piddle on the blaze if no spare hosepipes are available c) put the pupil forward for a citizenship award and invite him to open the new building?

If your answers are: mainly (a) - you have a nice mixture of humour and naivety and will go far; mainly (b) - your eagerness to please blocks any chance of preferment in modern education; mainly (c) - congratulations, you could cynic for England, so welcome to the headship of Gradgrind Academy.