Sending your child off to school for the first time in their life is terrifying.

I cry at everything, even the length of the queue at Sainsbury's.

Society prizes a girl for being thin more than anything else she might bring to the table.

When popularity is your only goal, doing well in class is going to feature very low, if at all, on your priority list.

If one's honest about it, spending time in a car with children is pretty ghastly.

I was accorded the opportunity to learn by failing - albeit at the cost of a few honourable teachers' sanity - and now I realise what a rare and incredible luxury that is.

There is so much that is positive, wonderful even, about state schools. At a state school your kids will learn to live alongside and appreciate other kids from many diverse and different cultures.