‘Manufacture]’Sabrina Manuel is one of the new intake of 11-year-olds, from a state primary school in Mill Hill Her father is an engineer, her mother a dental assistant ‘My Dad wanted me to come here since I was little He liked the results it gets,’ she said. The biggest impact that North London Collegiate has made on young Sabrina after a week lies not in the lure of its hollow hedges and spider trees, but in its books ‘She’s very impressed by the library,’ says her mother ‘She says it’s a very good collection. She wasn’t very satisfied with what she could find in our local libraries.’With pupils like this, a large part of the school’s job lies in preventing them from putting too much pressure on themselves. The new girls are deliberately being set no homework for the first two weeks, while they get over the shock of transition. ‘My school was only 300 people in a very little building,’ says Nicola Hughes, 11, from a state school in Pinner, Middlesex, whose parents are a manager in computers and a representative for industrial tribunal cases ‘It made you nervous here at first. We used to be the oldest people in our schools.’In two weeks’ time the new girls will be doing between an hour and an hour-and-a-half’s homework a night and the school’s job of stopping some of them overdoing it will be underway.In spring last year Mrs Clanchy resigned from the National Curriculum Council because she believed the English component had become too test-orientated. This year she publicly criticised the introduction of starred A grades into GCSE level: ‘It will lead to nervousness and cramming,’ she said, ‘which it will be very hard to resist.”They’re always saying ‘An A is an A’,’ says Rachel Lissauer, 17, starting a new year in the Upper Sixth ‘People are competitive Not in an outward way, but with themselves.

Everyone works hard, and people can be negative about themselves because they’re surrounded by so many people that are good Someone got 10 starred As at GCSE It’s ridiculous] Ten]’Teachers don’t push your work If there was pressure it would be a nightmare here They’ll say, do nine GCSEs Don’t do 11. They’ll say, it’s a good thing to go to a new university, look for the course, not the prestige.’ Despite this sage guidance, 23 out of about 100 in the Upper Sixth went to Oxbridge in 1993, and all went on to some form of higher education.The North London Collegiate old girl is, said one, typically very confident and rather noisy in groups, Esther Rantzen and Eleanor Bron being the best-known examples of the phenomenon. Another old girl is Susie Orbach, author of Fat is a Feminist Issue, who was at the school in the Fifties ‘It was terribly snobby then. I remember being told about the different types of houses in my first year Detached was where it was at I lived in a flat in Chalk Farm. That was really not all right, so I was completely rebellious.

At 15 I got expelled for having sex and being naughty.’For the moment, the new intake can concentrate on settling in, and their exhausted mothers can rest from the labour of sewing their names on to pairs of brown knickers and lacrosse socks and look forward to one-and-a-half hours of extra peace a night – when homework starts, next Thursday.(Photographs omitted). THE VERY good news, as revealed on Critical Eye’s ‘Service with a Smile’ (C4), is that if you are shot by an armed policewoman at Heathrow Airport, help will be immediately at hand. ‘On our belt we carry a wound-dressing kit,’ said one such officer, her Heckler & Koch machine pistol cradled comfortably across her bosom. ‘So if we do shoot someone, we can be first on the scene to apply first aid.’
Thirty years ago, women police officers were not allowed to carry truncheons.

Now, partly thanks to the invention of the personal radio which allows them to summon muscle in extremis, they are expected to do exactly the same duties as their male colleagues. And, if the programme is to be believed, more.’All I have to do is raise an eyebrow, or look over my glasses, and they stop,’ said one senior woman officer explaining her disorder-management technique. Place a woman in a crisis, the programme reckoned, and they are less likely to be confrontational, more likely to effect a peaceful solution than the blundering, bully-boy tactics favoured by their male mates. Oil on troubled waters rather than an Alka-Seltzer popped into the foam.’I walked in and there was this man, bare-chested, waving a bar stool over his head,’ was typical of the anecdotal evidence of women on the job. ‘I tried to speak to him like I was his mother or his sister. But before I said anything, he took one look at me and put down the stool.’Easy job, then. Just send matron in.Unfortunately, the programme went on, many male police officers are not as compliant as bar-stool-wielding thugs.