Now bowling from the Nursery End, it’s Tuffers in a tutu

HIGHGATE SCHOOL in North London, the £20,370-a-year alma mater of poet John Betjeman and cricketer-turned-gameshow panellist Phil Tufnell, used to be an all-boys’ establishment.

Now it sees itself at the cutting edge of gender equality, becoming one of the first schools to introduce unisex toilets — a gesture which backfired spectacularly when parents complained. Undeterred, it brought in gender-neutral uniforms and over Christmas rewrote the traditional carol God Rest Ye Merry Gentlemen to erase ‘men’ and replace it with ‘Gentlefolk’. They’ll be telling pupils next that Jesus was a girl — or, at least, gender fluid.

Elsewhere, the new president of the Girls’ Schools Association, Gwen Byrom, says women who want to get on in life should look for a ‘househusband’. If a male teacher had told his pupils that men who want to succeed should get themselves a ‘housewife’ he’d have been crucified.

And in another attempt to break down boundaries between men’s and women’s sport, it is being suggested that boys should be given zumba and ballet classes.

Ruth Holdaway, chief executive of Women In Sport, said: ‘If the boys get to play football and cricket and the girls play rounders and have a dance class — you are not offering girls the same opportunities.’

If Betjeman had been through the modern education system, Joan Hunter Dunn would have been a rugby prop forward.

And Tuffers would have been prancing around in Swan Lake, not gracing cricket pitches.