Blindfolded feeding of Jelly

A party game in my youth saw two blindfolded contestants feeding each other with a spoon from a dish of jelly. The "food" inevitably was plastered in the hair, ears and neck, in fact virtually everywhere above the shoulders except in the mouth. The observers enjoyed it, and even the contestants.

Earlier this month guidelines were published which will make schools' admission practices rather like jelly feeding contestants.

Anything which discriminates against children from poor backgrounds is prohibited. So birth certificates are out, as are photographs, as well as interviewing parents. No supplementary information may be sought or given, nothing to identify the children or the parents, in case bias is introduced.

In fact there seems little point in applying for your child to join a particular school. This is just what the government wants, despite its talk of choice, and its encouragement of lotteries is part of the same.

Given that intelligence, measured by the IQ indicator, is normally distributed, with the familiar bell-shape, if selection is purely at random, then we would expect very few school classes to have more than one or two high IQ children, and the same number of very low IQ children.

The result will be what the government seems to want - the vast majority of school classes to have average children with a few advanced and very bright children and also a few who will struggle.

This is exactly what happens, - attention is concentrated on the large and average centre groups, and those with different needs will tend to be neglected.

The differences in very large schools can be accommodated by streaming, - putting together students of equal ability from across the whole school year. The cost of this is the size of school necessary to provide viable sized groups for all ability levels in all subjects.

Given the problems associated with size, the only real solution is selection.

The present policy, leaving aside catchment areas and "corruption" in intake, will answer the ideological need, but is likely to leave both the most able and least able frustrated and under-achieving, separate siblings and need over-large schools.