A Flat Spin

Ditto as you contemplate the whizzo Prospectus. You know how it goes: we at St Custard’s passionately believe in the whole child and lots of excellence and learning things and Tolerance Zero and meeting the challenge of a changing world and no child is left behind in a deeply caring, pastoral environment ... and our teachers are so “industrious, creative and inspiring” that the dimmest of wits will morph into Russell Group flyers. Marvellous.

My old school takes the biscuit. I gaze at the 2013 prospectus. Yikes, but it’s sophisticated. It peddles a modern Downton Abbey/Apprentice ambience. There are pictures of rowing and cricket and beady scholars in bow ties and lots of glass and lights and escalators. A palace of learning, whose walls are littered with banal gobbets and a lot of posh Latin. Things like – fluctuat nec mergitur – esse quam videri. Not half. The Leadership Group – in cool black and white – seem to be going for a sort of mimsy, Messianic look.