Another mission impossible confronts those weary and exploited underlings at the Department for Education. This week they have already had to produce a positive spin on the now finalised U-turn on those enforced academisation plans - though this kind of re-spinning of the message was surely meat and drink to a team now highly trained in the art.
But I suspect those same beleaguered Oompa-Loompas are feeling completely stumped by another daunting brief currently on their plate: the prime minister herself will have demanded that they find a new and fail-safe selection test for her proposed new grammar schools.
She is adamant that it must no longer favour the affluent, tutor-hiring middle-classes. There must be no prospect of 11-plus tutors touting for business outside nursery schools, no tabloid talk of it giving birth to “the first tutor-midwife”.
Already we can assume some helpless flailing around on this. Many a despairing e-mail will have been sent to a similarly despairing Justine Greening. But if the PM does refuse to take no for an answer, then perhaps there is one selection option they could offer her, given the lack of anything else. It is perhaps the only national test of children that everyone would see as fair, tutor-proof, classless and even popular with those young people taking the test: selection by water-bottle flipping.
Schools are banning bottle-flipping because it is, in the vernacular of the staffroom, ‘bloody annoying’
Most people reading this will be familiar with the flipping of the plastic bottle of water - in fact, all too familiar. It involves our young people repeatedly spinning their plastic bottle of water into the air with the aim of making it land upright on its base. It took off after some cool, bottle-tossing dude in the US went viral in the summer. It’s now rife in just about every playground. Some schools have been moved to ban it - not for health and safety reasons but simply because it is, in the vernacular of the staffroom, “bloody annoying”.
But if bottle-flipping were adopted to determine grammar school selection (three attempts and you’re either out or in - that simple) it would at least be a test that was undeniably “fair” and accessible to all.
On duty in our comprehensive playground, I have seen just how open and equitable it is. All manner of children have a go, regardless of gender, class or income. Yes, the occasional middle-class boy does win the contest with his own bottle of (probably authentic) Evian. But equally, I have watched the breaktime title being taken by gifted “working-class” children with plain and sometimes quite battered bottles of basic tap-water. Talent and self-tutoring commitment are really the only dividing factors in this genuinely level playing-field.
This will doubtless be viewed by many as a farcical and ridiculous suggestion, but it feels right. For when Theresa May confirmed that grammar schools were coming back, most of us saw this for what it was: another plastic bottle being spun into the air, with no real clue as to how it might land. The government has been doing this in the playground repeatedly and - yes - it is infinitely more “bloody annoying” when they do it.
Stephen Petty is head of humanities at Lord Williams’s School in Thame, Oxfordshire
