Name: Geri Halliwell
Age: 43.
Appearance: The future of your child’s education.
OK, you have my attention. Good, because that was a shameless exaggeration. Geri has expressed interest in opening a free school. That’s all.
She has? Apparently, she actually has. She’s consulted with the Department for Education and, if all goes well, she’ll open the school in North London in 2018.
But is she qualified? Well, it’s a free school, so nobody really needs to be “qualified” so much as “vaguely interested in getting a good place for their well-off kids”.
So the answer’s no? Listen, this weekend, Halliwell said: “I believe in education. It’s an empowering fundamental human right that everyone deserves. Education is a foundation for life.” Does that answer your question?
No. Well, that doesn’t matter. Halliwell is eminently suited to open a free school. She wants it to focus on the arts and business, for example, which is slap-bang in the centre of the axis that made the Spice Girls such a worldwide phenomenon.
She’s just going to teach the arts and business? Initially, yes, but there’s no reason why she couldn’t branch out into different subjects. Go on, suggest one and I’ll tell you how great she is at it.
OK. Maths. She recorded a song with the Spice Girls called 2 Become 1.
Languages. Are you forgetting her 1999 No 1 hit Mi Chico Latino? Truly a masterclass in how to cop off with a Spanish boy.
Sex education. She had an album track called Feels Like Sex, which included the lyrics: “If the mood is rude, then you got the right attitude.”
Geography. Does that line in Spice Up Your Life about the yellow man from Timbuktu count? No, actually, you’re probably right. Maybe not geography.
Do say: “I wanna, I wanna, I wanna, I wanna …”
Don’t say: “I really really really wanna be accused of exacerbating a two-tier education system that can favour middle-class students over their poorer counterparts.”
