The long summer holiday is almost over and next week most children will be back at school.

There's just time for that last party, final lie-in and a trip to the beach for a languorous swim.

It's almost half a century ago now but I can still recall that feeling of dread as the autumn term approached. Schools were forbidding places then and little was done to make them pleasant for the pupils.

I was one of only three boys from my primary school to go to my secondary school, Latymer Upper in Hammersmith, back in 1953. The school ensured that we were separated whereas now we would be kept together.

I had a tremendous sense of desolation as I went down the seemingly endless corridor with the 150 other boys in my year, nearly all of them strangers and as frightened as I was.

Despite spending seven years at that school, I never returned. But looking up the Friends Reunited web site to see what had happened to the boys, now all over 60, I was reminded of what it was like.

Reminiscences about the masters emphasised that nearly all of them had served in the Second World War.

They maintained a military-style discipline because it was what they had been accustomed to for many years. Some employed corporal punishment to excess.

How things have changed. The old clich that schooldays are the happiest days of your life was emphatically not true in my case.

Yet I know some kids today who, while enjoying the long summer break, are looking forward to returning to secondary school in September.

Schools vary but in most of them, public or state, there is a real willingness by staff to make children welcome and equip them for adult life once they leave for jobs or further education instead of just chucking them out with minimal career advice as occurred in the Fifties.

Latymer was a grammar school and as such was supposed to contain the best brains. The entrance exam was stiff and it accepted only one in seven of those who had passed the 11-plus.

Yet conditions were Spartan and little attempt was made to develop our imaginations.

People at public schools who endured privations such as prison in later life have often said they were able to do so because they were so harsh they inured them to anything.

The majority who failed the 11-plus went to secondary modern schools where it was hard to escape the sensation that at that early age they were failures.

The comprehensive school system seemed a good idea at the time to bring fair chances for all into education.

But it didn't always work out that way and one of its unintended effects was to give a sustained boost to public schools which had been dying on their feet against competition from grammar schools.

But the trouble with comprehensives was that they tended to dumb down rather than level up. In many of them, the academic distinction of the grammar schools was lost and there were still thousands of non-academic kids not getting much out of school.

There are still huge problems in our education system today and you only have to ask any teacher to hear what some of them are.

But the Government's new system of specialist colleges and schools, already widely introduced in Sussex, should create centres of excellence for everything from languages to drama.

I'd far rather go to school now than in the Fifties and there's no way in which the authoritarian regimes of those days would be tolerated now.

Let's hope most kids feel the same and next week they'll be skipping into school rather than skipping off it.