It's never quite been possible to work out what it is with Polly Toynbee. She'll argue, vociferously, at cross purposes with herself and the difficulty is whether she does this deliberately, in pursuit of some political point or other, or is it simply the not knowing much about that reality out there? 

For example, she's spent decades insisting that the idea of different schools for those of varied abilities - a split, say, into academic and vocational schools as with grammars and secondary moderns - is an anathema, a stain on our very society in fact. All must be educated in the same place in much the same manner, in comprehensives.

But today the conversation is about technical education, apprenticeships and so on for the, as she herself says,. non-university going classes. Thus she says:

Brexit turbo-charges the need for German-style technical education when the door slams shut on importing the skills we lack.

That German system divides into those academic and technical streams at the age of 10. And there's pretty much no way out of the technical into the academic stream after that age either. Certainly graduation from the technical stream does not enable a more academic tertiary education.

That is, the German system divides earlier and is even more rigid in its divisions than that older British system which is so anathematised. Which leaves us with our question about Polly. Is it just that anything is fair game in making a political point? Or is it that she just doesn't know?