Esperanza Aguirre, the flamboyant right-wing president of the Community of Madrid, has announced an educational initiative: the Bachillerato de Excelencia. This 'elite baccalaureate' will be aimed at the very best of Madrid students according to their marks in ESO, the qualification on completing basic secondary education at age 16. Up to 100 of the highest achieving students will be concentrated in a new centre, to be taught by the most brilliant teachers. According to Aguirre, the project that begins in September 2011 will emphasise the values of "excellence, work, effort, study, talent and dedication". And who would quarrel with those admirable aims? However ...

* Viewed from an International Baccalaureate perspective, this project involves a change of name but not of substance. Apparently, the Bachillerato de Excelencia simply offers the standard Bachillerato programmes of either Science and Technology or Social Sciences - although the teaching will be "adapted to the level of the students". Precise details (or indeed any details at all) are not currently available.

* The scheme will offer the very best teaching to up to 100 students. According to figures provided by the Community of Madrid ( Datos y Cifras de la Educación 2010-2011 ), this year there are 96,038 students studying the Bachillerato in all Madrid. Roughly 0.1% of Bachillerato students will benefit.

Put like that, the scheme seems trivial in the extreme, so why bother with such a hyped announcement? Esperanza Aguirre may be many things as a politician, but she is not stupid. There are important local elections coming up in May, and this is part of her strategy to win an even greater majority. She understands her electorate very well and she is appealing to what I would like to call Top-up Theory.

Top-up Theory says that if you make the best better, everyone else gets better too. This theory is a branch of Trickle-down Theory, which states that if you make the rich richer, everyone else gets richer too. The trouble is that neither Theory seems to work.

Trickle-down has been discredited by economic figures showing that while money does trickle if the richer rich set up new businesses, it doesn't trickle much, or far. In this example of Top-up Theory, if you move the very clever students to some distant ivory tower, how will the values of "excellence, work, effort, study, talent and dedication" trickle anywhere to anyone? Especially if you move the very best teachers to said ivory tower as well.

What Aguirre is astutely doing is appealing to mythic thinking, not rational thinking. The new centre for the Bachillerato de Excelencia symbolises something that it is tempting to believe: that an isolated example of things getting better means that everything is getting better. But this neat idea crumbles the moment that you look at it carefully.

One of the great strengths of the IB, to me, is that it proposes the virtues of  "excellence, work, effort, study, talent and dedication" for all levels of ability. Years ago, all of the St Clare's teachers were in the office the day the results came out, feverishly scanning to see which student had done what - and the biggest cheer was for Victoria, who had scraped the Diploma with 24 points. Victoria had no intellectual 'talent', but her 'excellence' was her capacity for 'work, effort, study, ... and dedication'.

I propose my new Top-down & Trickle-up Theory : if you insert the Top in the middle of the real world, everything Trickles Up.