Things you’ll only get if you went to Smestow, the most bang average school around

My secondary school: the place where being average was taken way too seriously.

It was a markedly mediocre experience, full of middle-of-the-road pupils. Nothing extremely bad, nothing extremely good. I personally really enjoyed it. I am however honest about its limitations, and apologise to Smestow School and sixyh Form for what I am about to discuss.

This is what growing up in a average state school was like. (Yes, get ready for some huge generalisations).

A great man who I cannot name, maybe due to my questionable education, once said: “Every action has an equal and opposite reaction. This is very much where I find myself when thinking about my time there. For everything great about it, it had an equal and opposite shitty-ness to it. School life was about survival of the fittest.”

Anyone older than you was feared

Come September every year, Year 7s were horrified by older pupils. Being a small kid I feared this the most. My backpack weighed more than I did, I was an easy target. Fortunately, the stories were extremely exaggerated, and they were actually just normal people.

Let’s just forget Year 8 ever happened.

School fights were our entertainment 

Take physical altercations as another example of the Darwinian prospects we faced. Now I really do not condone violence, but when it happened (which was actually rarely) it was the most exciting thing since my Mum called the school to get me out of a Friday detention.

The uproar from hungry lunch queue spectators when two blood thirsty pupils started swinging for each other other was amazingly entertaining. Not to mention the souvenirs of torn out hair that could be salvaged and sold on the school black market for a strawberry lace afterwards.

Surviving winter wasn’t easy

Winter was an especially trying time. Snowballs? More like iceballs. No, I am not referring to cold testicles, although that probably was a part of it too. I am referring to the savage beatings that we inflicted upon each other by hurling compacted ice from the tennis courts at each other’s heads.

Even scarier was when the school bus would get pelted as it meandered through the grid-locked streets, each hit sounding like a mini grenade battering at the window. I am extremely surprised that shards of glass were not smashed into my face. Luckily, thanks to the iceballs, I can appreciate how that would feel.

The leaked nude pandemic

And who can forget the leaked nude pandemic of the early 2010s? It swept across UK schools with such ferocity that nearly no one escaped it. Every week a new NSFW scandal. Gone were the sweet days of MSN, it was time for BlackBerry Messenger to reign supreme in all its glory. Avoiding this was one of the major achievements of my education.

Passing notes

Technology had not made old school shenanigans redundant though, real paper notes were passed around too. The classic Year 7 “Will you go out with me?” or an obscene and graphic illustration of the teacher were common and both equally as offensive.

The most important multiple-choice test ever taken.

Ofsted Reports

In a vain effort to rebuke its reputation, “This is a good school” – Ofsted 2009, was printed on to almost every surface.

But it wasn’t all bad

So what was I able to take away from my experiences, aside from my slightly above national average grade GCSEs?

I can now revel in the fact that we were never forced to take on useless extra courses to make our schools look better in the league tables.  I can be proud that my school was not selective, but offered the best it could to anyone and everyone. And I can smile when I read my Year 9 report that was so obviously copy and pasted with [insert pupil’s name here].

Crucially, everyone who has survived an average schooling should be proud that we have beaten even harder odds to get to where we are today.

Yes, it was mediocre. But we wouldn’t change it for the world.