When I was nine years old, I headed off to St James Middle School in Bury St Edmunds in my smart blue blazer.

It turned out that I was the only child who owned such a blazer.

Or at least, if the others had one, they weren’t stupid enough to wear theirs.

As usual I had it ever so slightly wrong, but as my grandfather always said, ‘Never be ashamed of your eccentricities, my girl,’ so I wore that old blazer with pride every day and have carried on being ever so slightly wrong about most things ever since.

Eccentricity can, I hope, be an endearing quality when it refers to a woman making her way in the world.

When it is less endearing, is when it affects others and of course I here refer you to the rather eccentric goings on in our education system in Bury St Edmunds of late.

For those who don’t know, our middle schools are closing this summer, so it’s farewell to Hardwick, Howard and my beloved St James.

Suffolk county council decided to turn us ‘two tier’ in order to save money. Sorry, I mean in order ‘to have a structure that raises standards and is consistent with the national pattern of education’.

This they have done, with local primary schools adding on extra classrooms to take children up to 11, and local upper schools, including the Bury Schools Partnership’s King Edward’s, St Benedict’s, and the still to be built Sybil Andrews Academy, to take children from aged 11.

Not everyone was happy about this, so there is also an alternative group of schools – the Bury St Edmunds All Through Trust, comprising County Upper school, Horringer and Westley Middles and Tollgate and Barrow primaries – which continues to offer education in three phases (4-9, 9-13, 13-18).

As a big supporter of the middle phase, it has never sat easily with me that across the country our private schools continue to persist with three phases – pre-prep, prep and upper, while we plebs are expected to be happy with just the two.

However, without getting into the rights and wrongs of two tier versus three tier – generally I find that we all gravitate to the system we went through ourselves – Bury parents clearly still have a great deal of choice, an option that was only added to last week when it was announced that the All Through Trust is to add a technical academy to its stable, to serve pupils better suited to learning in a more applied way, with a brand new middle school – or ‘middle phase’, for 9-13 year olds – also being added on the same site.

The irony of course is that on the one hand three middle schools are closing, while on the other hand, money for another ‘middle phase’ has just been approved.

“A woeful waste of public funds,” the Bury Schools Partnership called it, in a letter to the Education Secretary Nicky Morgan. It is certainly a muddle and, for anyone heartbroken at the closure of their middle school, it is a stab in the heart to know that after all the efforts that have been expended in recent years telling us that middle schools have had their day; the Government now sees fit to build another one.

But, leaving local politics aside, the opportunity for Bury to have its own technical academy – and to be a genuine pioneer in an educational approach explicitly designed to best cater to a student’s individual needs and ways of learning – is surely a good thing?

In Bury, we have been arguing too long about the structure, when what really matters is the delivery.

We have been worrying too much about the two tier versus three tier battle, rather than taking a breath and thinking – wow! Look at what we’ve got now.

Let’s be grateful that in Bury we have fantastic head teachers who passionately believe in their own approaches; and none of whom – and I speak from experience of knowing and admiring many of them – wants anything but the best for the pupils in their care.

We are all now free to choose whether to wear the three phase or the two phase blazer, which makes us Bury parents very lucky.

So, let’s stop arguing about how we got here and start seeing the benefits of where we are now. Because, in the end, as I discovered at St James, whichever blazer you wear doesn’t matter.

It’s what happens in the classroom that counts.

Did you go to St James or Hardwick or Howard and would like to share your memories? Email me