Foul.

Hundreds of boys aged eleven and twelve voluntarily spend ninety minutes doing basketball drills under the scrutiny of a dozen adults.

No names - just numbers drawn in black marker on their arms and upper thighs to identify them to the coaches.

Those boys will be divided into groups of ability, culled, divided into smaller groups, culled again.

The coaches will gather at the end of each session to compare notes and shuffle names.

Lists are emailed to parents together with training timetables.

This process will take a couple of weeks of sessions.

Drill, scrutiny, divide, cull, list, drill.

Parents are not allowed to observe.

At the end of it, there will be seven teams of ten boys, ranked from those with the highest skills, to those with the least.

With a few disappointed and noisy exceptions, everyone accepts the result because the process and each boy’s skills were open.

That’s how a weekend basketball sporting competition operates.

Those same boys - along with hundreds of thousands of others - progress through successive years of school in their same cohort behind closed doors for thirteen years - educated and drilled with a programme based solely on the date they were born.

That’s how thirteen years of school preparing each boy for life operates.