I’m still amazed that nobody flushed my head down the loo on my first day at big school

As his daughter prepares for her first term in secondary education, Will Gore wonders if anyone gets their lunch money nicked any more

This week many children will be starting secondary school – cause for apprehension on Will’s part (PA)

As a child, I usually felt ready to return to school by the time the summer holidays came to an end. Even though my family tended to spend a fortnight of the break away from home, the six weeks still seemed to go on forever. When we weren’t away, my brother and I played in the garden, fought, and watched as much kids’ TV as was available in the 1980s and early 1990s. By the time September came, I couldn’t avoid the conclusion that I was bored.

That’s not to say I was exactly jumping for joy about getting back into the classroom, but for the most part any pre-term butterflies were as much about the excitement of seeing friends and settling back into the old routine as they were about nerves for a new year starting.

The only exception I can recall was during the summer before I started secondary school, when I became progressively sicker with anxiety as the weeks went on.

Really, the switch was undramatic. True, the comprehensive was three times bigger than my junior school, and took in kids from half a dozen villages around ours. But 50 per cent of the children in my year had been my schoolmates since we were five, and the school itself was only 10 minutes’ walk from our house. It was hardly like swapping a pastoral primary for Grange Hill.

Nevertheless, having watched a lot of Grange Hill, I was fairly confident that it must be pretty representative of the general state of secondary education in the UK. I fully anticipated finding drug-taking to be de rigueur and bullying to be a way of life.

My fear was fuelled by tales told in awed tones by my pal next door, who had already been at the school for a couple of years and who advised me to watch out for a lad in the top year, name of Chris Abrams. Apparently, he was the school tough, and I became convinced that at some point he would single me out for a hiding and a head-flushing in the bogs.

Staggeringly, however, the big boys in Year 11 turned out not to be the least bit interested in quiet, studious kids in Year 7. The only bullying I got was some fairly inoffensive name-calling by children in my own year, usually about how square I was. On one occasion someone swung a football in a carrier bag at my head, but it only gave me a glancing blow.

That’s not to say the school was free of violence. Fights on the school playing fields were not particularly uncommon, and I still remember vividly the sound that was made by the Doc Marten of one boy in my year when it struck the head of another boy with force. It seemed to echo, bringing their scrap to an end just before a couple of teachers arrived on the scene.

This week my daughter is making the transition from primary to secondary education and has raised significantly less fuss about it than her father did three decades ago. This despite the fact that she is going to a school in the next town to ours, will have to catch a bus to get there, and will be joined by only a handful of the children who were in her class during her junior school years.

Uniform has been laid out, bag packed, bus times checked, and there is a general air of anticipation in the house about the stimulating time ahead. I find myself as excited about what is in store as my daughter is herself, and feel desperate to know every detail – from the funky canteen menu, to what they might learn in history this year.

Of course, if she has her lunch money nicked and her head flushed down the loo in week one, we might have to reappraise the situation. But I’ve already warned her, keep an eye out for a lad named Abrams.