The school year that has just begun may end with the humiliation of the education minister Caitriona Ruane or with the collapse of the grammar school system.

At this stage, neither of the two parties thinks it will be the loser.

The schools are preparing to set tests for applicant children and the Minister is blithely insisting that these are unnecessary.

She is encouraging parents to ignore the tests and the parents are disregarding that advice.

At the same time, her department has encapsulated two contradictory messages into one advice leaflet.

One of these is that all schools will be expected to observe |quotas for free school meals, |representative of the need in their particular locality.

This would imply an intake which is based on proximity and need, rather than by selection through testing.

Yet, the department acknowledges that tests are coming, and advises parents to be aware that the deadline of September 18 is fast approaching.

In reality, it is not the parents, the exam results or the Department of Education which will decide the future of academic selection here.

It is the courts.

Ms Ruane has established formal guidelines by which children can be admitted to secondary education. But, since she has failed to gain cross-party support for the ending of selection at 11, these guidelines do not have a sound legal basis.

They do not have the weight of an act of the Assembly behind them.

On the other hand, the tests the schools are setting have no legal basis either.

The grammar schools have |chosen to impose a burden on |the whole education system in their own interests or, as some undoubtedly believe, in the |interests of preserving educational standards, against plans of the Department of Education to reduce them.

Teachers unions say they know what is going to happen. A family will apply for admission to a grammar school for a child.

Then that child will not even take the test and will be rejected.

The family will then seek a judicial review of that decision.

If the courts decide that the rejection of the child was unwarranted, because it was in breach of departmental guidelines, then hundreds of children will learn that they swotted unnecessarily for selection tests.

Parents of those who played the game will feel cheated, either by the schools which imposed testing that had no value, or by the Department of Education, which failed to get its guidelines into law by a route that didn’t require it to trample over thousands of children. In all likelihood, the family that will mount that legal challenge has already made the decision and will have legal advice.

The parameters of the coming showdown are in place.

The schools continue towards their testing, apparently oblivious to the danger and Caitriona Ruane conducts herself like a minister who knows — probably on the basis of legal advice she has taken herself — that she will win.

Her problems may come after the legal ruling; indeed it is hard to see any outcome that won’t be a disaster for her.

An affirmation of the right of schools to set tests will make her guidelines useless; a ruling that the tests are illegal will present her with chaos in the system, many children having passed the tests only to be told that they now have to go to their local school, whether it has previously been a grammar school or not.

But if Ruane is in danger |of having more work dumped on her lap than she can manage, what of the grammar schools and those who led them into a battle which they may yet lose and whose consequences — should they lose it will be ruinous?

Well, some are fighting for survival anyway. They present themselves in the educational market as providers of a specific product, quality education and a more assured route to a good university.

They fear that, if they lose the right to sell themselves in that way, their numbers will dwindle.

And they have the support of many parents who eagerly wish to preserve the grammar school system. Indeed, one of the insights provided by this whole contest is that many Catholic families are more interested in their children being educated in a grammar school than in a Catholic school.

If forced to choose, they would have sent their children to a state or Protestant school. It was in recognition of that reality that the Catholic system reversed its opposition to selection. Currently, the Catholic bishops are saying the selection test is a three year interim arrangement. That is not how the schools and parents see it.

And, by the end of this academic year, if their challenge to |the Department’s guidelines has survived the courts, they may feel so flushed with victory that they will never want to give ground.

On the other hand, they may see the whole selection system in a mess and begin to reflect on their own contribution to it.