OK, here's my school story. It sounds big-headed and rather self-pitying but I hope you know me better than that by now.

My first year of secondary school was spent at an establishment that had just gone comprehensive after being a grammar school, but many of the teachers and traditions survived. I was in the top set, it was just before the summer holidays, and we had recently taken end-of-year exams.

We had one lesson of religious education a week, taken by a stereotypical games teacher (think Kes). Anyway, he caught me looking out of the window one day and so he demanded to know, in his usual abrupt manner, how I had got on in a couple of my subjects (there had been no exam in RE). The answer was I had come first both of them. So he tried other subjects and it was much the same answer. (In fact I had come first in everything except for third in English and second in biology - I think it was.) "Oh, perhaps you can afford to look out of the window then," he said.

Unfortunately I left that summer because I didn't get on with two of the boys and a new school had just opened nearer to home. I had assumed that schools were much the same but how wrong I was. This new school had no academic ambitions at all and it seemed to me that it wanted to bring everyone down to the lowest level, something for which socialism is sometimes blamed. It made me more of a Tory than Margaret Thatcher later proved to be, although I've mellowed with age. My parents tried to get me back into the first school but no one would listen. They didn't know what to say or whom to see and the headmaster was obstinate.

In the end I was the only person in my year in a school of about 1,000 to go to university and the only one to get more than two A-levels (largely because most of the others had transfered from a secondary modern). This was after I was urged to apply only to polytechnics and not universities at all, despite decent O-levels. I had wanted to read English but they said that competition was too fierce and I was badly advised to apply for a course that combined English with music, even though I wasn't doing music A-level. The result was five straight rejections, no interviews, no open days. When the results came out I applied for just English and got straight in through the clearing system.

My one regret in life is that I didn't go to a grammar school, or at least an academic type of school.  To this day, I won't listen to anyone who praises the virtues of comprehensive education, unless he has been to such a school himself.

Our intention was to keep our boys in the State system.  They went to State primary and junior schools and because we live in a very good catchment area, the start was very good.  However, our local comprensive is absolutely enormous and covers such a wide area I felt that my two would have just been overlooked.  They were bright but lazy and unless pupils are disruptive, they seem to be left to fend for themselves.  Mine would have done as little as possible and would have got away with it.  So at 11 they both went to a private school with small classes where they wouldn't be allowed to sit back and do the bare minimum.  They both needed a shove.  It proved to be the correct decision.

I also had the same idea of State education for my grandchild as far as possible although at 11 he would still only have the choice of that one comprehensive.  However, it was obviously not meeting his requirements so I hoisted him out and put him into a private school where he has blossomed and thrived.  My other one has gone straight into the private sector and will stay all the way up.

The local comprehensive does have an element that has excellent results.  It would need to for the size it is.  It also has more than its fair share of the other element and whilst none of my offspring seem to be easily-led I decided not to put them in the way of trouble before they had to be.  It always comes later in their life and you just have to hope and pray they don't get in with the wrong crowd.

The private sector does have a more materialistic attitude I grant you - but you don't have to join in with that.   I'm hoping that if he continues to flourish he may get a scholarship at 11.  They only have a couple of free places though and competition is fierce.  I'm not relying on it and I'm certainly not going to push him.  He's doing fine on his own.

My experience was similar to Tony's, only in reverse.  I went to a comprehensive school that had previously been a secondary modern: the teachers were a very mixed bag, but it had a depressingly utilitarian philosophy of education, if it could be called that at all.  I do remember one of the fool careers advisers telling us all that if we hadn't decided 'what we were going to do with our lives' by the age of 14, then we were 'in trouble'.  It didn't occur to me to ask the obvious question and inquire whether he'd been all set on becoming a career adviser at that age?

And there was the games teacher who once tore someone's copy of Smash Hits out of their hand and read aloud to the class an interview with Boy George contained therein, in which B.G. stated that the one person he'd take to a desert island would be 'our drummer, Jon Moss'.  'Isn't that disgusting?' sneered the miserable bullying bigot, who is still, as I write this, 'teaching' at the same school. 

My daughter attends the local comprehensive, which is in most respects an excellent and academically ambitious school, with a very wide range of extra-curricular activities.  She has been very happy there, and I am convinced that she has had an education every bit as good as in the private sector - in fact we turned down the offer of a place at the local girls' independent school.

But...

She attends the school that Brighton's middle-classes are prepared to lie, cheat and sell their elderly relatives to get their kids into.  The main reason why she is there is that, in the face of all the rhetoric about choice, we can afford to buy the right postcode and live in the right catchment area: when Brighton council tried to make the catchments more equable (because the schools are not evenly distributed geographically around town), all hell broke loose.  There are wonderful things going on in other schools, but, as long as selection by parental income exists, we will never have a truly comprehensive system; it is a simple and demonstrable fact that educational attainment, in general (of course there are large numbers of individual counter-examples, but the general trend is clear) is closely linked to parental income. 

It is interesting that some of the strongest pressure to go comprehensive in the 1960s and 1970s came from middle-class parents who didn't like the risk that academic failure would mean their kids mixing with the oiks in the secondary-modern; parental choice has largely allowed that ethos to prevail, and it seems to me that a lot of the rhetoric from both Tories and New Labour is about keeping it that way.

My experience parallels pw.  Prep school hell, Big school OK.  Particularly when I moved into the Fifth at 15 and realised the masters would talk to me as an adult.

The prep school was set in a small country house overlooking the Exe estuary, and was probably the most idyllic surroundings I have known.  Every day there was one of constant fear.  The headmaster/proprietor was a bullying, philistine snob.  He was an uncultured former military officer who produced a parody of a public school for boys up to 13.  We had games every single afternoon, in full view of the foothills of Dartmoor.  The rest of the staff I realised later were immensely sweet,no doubt in an attempt to make up to us.

If Tony W and sk's education understandably make them sympathetic to the right, mine at prep school in due course made me sympathetic in part to the left (which I discovered when I was so fortunate to learn about  it at my ancient university.)

But the real cause of anxiety in my schooldays was not teachers - it was the perpetual fear of intimidation by other pupils.  At my prep school, bullies had the example of the head (and his approval given his contempt for "sneaks"), but I knew it at the church state primary I attended for the first year of my education.  I can only remember one time being physically assaulted, but the fear of intimidation was always around.

I have never read Lord of the Flies.  I can remember hearing about it at school with the reviews that it was very shocking suggesting that kids can be nasty.  I thought it was self evidently apparent that they can be very nasty indeed without control.

I don't particularly want to talk about school days, because (a) they were not happy years at all, and I tend to sideline them in my mind nowadays, and (b) one of my teachers is here posting in this very thread (I will say that I have the most positive memories of maths teachers from there, though! )! One thing school did teach me was a profound scepticism bordering on outright disrespect for most forms of authority, and to absolutely detest all forms of snobbery.

Sorry to sound unfriendly but your type was probably the  reason my earlier schools were hell.

And Ian, if only there had been responsible authority at my prep school to stop bullying, rather than encourage it by example.

Certainly - alas many existing models of authority do tend towards the latter.