Previously they have created and set the rules whether the child is with their carer or relatives

“Previously, they have created and set the rules, whether the child is with their carer, or relatives.”Mrs Dowling says parents should be aware of the loss that accompanies a child’s starting school, and should not translate it into antagonism towards the school. And I got very upset when his teacher said that she’d had a confrontation with my son and she wasn’t going to let him win.”Emilia Dowling, consultant child psychologist at the Tavistock Clinic in London, says: “Parents just don’t expect that you will miss your children and want them to say that they miss you.”It is painful to watch your child under a teacher’s authority, lining up, told to sit still until the end of the session. “There is an element of letting go of the control and nurture that women have had to develop to care for their young children,” Mrs Dowling observes. I thought: ‘She’ll be doing her A-levels soon, and I’m getting old’.

It’s a reminder of the distance you’ve travelled.”Anne recalls wondering what her child was doing every moment of the day: “I was really worried at playtimes and lunchtimes about this big playground and this very little person. But once they had identified the lead characters,they became absorbed in the fast-moving plot and exaggerated emotions.Bryant points out that opera works on so many different levels – visual, musical and theatrical – that it is bound to appeal to children on at least one of them. Follow-up work gives her scope to make the most of pupils’ diverse abilities, accommodating musical, acting and set-designing talents in one project.And while children often like opera, opera houses are increasingly keen to get involved with educational work. Bryant had a week’s placement at English National Opera and also arranged for production staff from the Royal Opera House to spend two weeks composing an opera with her pupils.Such work is not entirely altruistic. Opera houses clearly see the need to cultivate future audiences if they are to survive well into the millennium.Pavilion Opera Educational Trust, Thorpe Tilney Hall, Near Lincoln LN4 3 SL; tel: 01526 378231.. When my son started school it wasn’t him who cried It was me. The sight of that small (and very keen) person vanishing into an unknown classroom was desperately painful I couldn’t understand it I had prepared for Thomas’s adjustment to school.

But I hadn’t anticipated the feelings of grief that swept over me during those first few weeks I felt I’d lost him. As thousands of little children troop through the doors of big school for the first time this week, many of their parents will be taken by surprise as they are overtaken by feelings of loss that they were not expecting. So busy have they been preparing their child for school to ensure that the transition will be as painless as possible that thoughts of their own feelings have been on the back-burner.
First-day adult tears at the school gate may be familiar to parents of older children but they are not to first-timers.Janet Willcocks, a nurse and mother of three, says: “I wasn’t expecting to feel as upset as I did when my eldest child, Jessica, started school It was the amount of hours she’d be spending away from me. Since then her class has been acclimatising to the unfamiliar sound by listening to Verdi during break times.

At first they put their hands over their ears, but before long they were starting to sing the melodies.For the first few minutes of the production, some of the younger children looked slightly confused and overwhelmed as bewigged performers swept in and out of the school hall, bellowing at each other in Italian. Younger children’s developing inner ears could in fact be damaged by opera’s louder moments, while teenagers soon become resistant to its high-brow image and snobbish connotations, explains Stockdale “But the younger children are so open-minded. I tell them the worst that can happen is that they have the most boring afternoon of their life.”In four years of performing in schools since the trust was founded, boredom has rarely been the response, and Stockdale finds plenty of interest when he talks to children about the diversity of jobs available in opera, from stage management to choreography and tailoring.When West Acton Primary teacher Linda Fairley first asked her class of eight- to nine-year-olds what they knew about opera, they said they had seen it on TV but usually switched over. “I’m checking to see whether their teachers have done their work,” he smiles drily, adding that a third of the time, to his annoyance, they have not.Stockdale also claims that it is more often teachers who are resistant to opera. “They say: ‘It’s not what our children are interested in.’” But Stockdale reckons that as long as he can get opera to inner-city audiences between the ages of eight and 14, the chances are that they will take to it. Each one-off afternoon performance costs about pounds 6,000 to stage.Pavilion (funded entirely by sponsors, mainly corporate) will visit schools only on the condition that children spend the weeks prior to their visit working on a project on the opera’s story, characters and music.Freddie Stockdale, a Pavilion trustee, vets schools in advance to gauge the enthusiasm of head and teachers and test the school hall’s acoustics.