Many Secondary Modern schools today are light, airy and colourful places. The entrance hall is invariably attractive with floral displays, arranged by the pupils, and good prints, nicely framed, hang upon the walls. These schools do everything they can to give aesthetic pleasure to the children and to awaken in them a desire for the best in the artistic world.

Gone are the days, which I remember, when a jam jar had to do service for the flowers brought in by the pupils to their teachers; nowadays the very best in pottery and china is ordered. As school secretary I typed an order for £20 worth of vases which included Wedgwood, Whitefriars and Denby ware, and from where I sit I can glimpse a flash of magnificent red as the sunlight plays upon a gorgeous ruby coloured glass vase in the headmaster's room. I could hug myself with sheer delight at its exquisite beauty. I'm certain that some children are influenced by all these beautiful things because sometimes even the most unlikely child can be seen studying the pictures which hang on the wall. As with vases, the best prints of the most famous artists are purchased and displayed freely.

As I entered the building the other morning I saw in the entrance hall - which a little later would have been seething with children - a small gipsy boy gazing, with a puzzled expression at a vivid Picasso print. He made an attractive picture himself with his curly jet black hair, bold black eyes and wearing blue jeans below a plaid shirt. As I watched him there I was immediately whisked back in time to when I was a small child in a great London school with a prison like exterior. I saw myself at the front of the class supposedly listening to a history lesson but in reality lost in a picture facing me on the wall. It showed a pale summer sky, with little fluffy clouds and below them the fields spread out in true English fashion, all divided by neat hedgerows. In the foreground was a field of ripe corn in which scarlet poppies were liberally sprinkled. I used to stare at this picture until the classroom receded and the teacher's voice became the droning of bees on a hot summer's day. Today that picture is as vivid to me as when, a child of eleven, I first looked upon it. From that moment a passion for the countryside was born in the heart of a city child and a window was opened to me.

I watched my gipsy boy. Would Picasso mean anything to him? What was he thinking? I asked him if he liked the picture.

"I dunno, Miss" he replied. "What's it meant to be?"

I wasn't very sure myself and didn't think that a speech from me of the use of colour and line by the artist, would mean very much to a child of the fields who attended school but intermittently and upon sufferance.

The Head of our Art Department, who has the rewarding task of purchasing the pictures and vases for our school, needs to be very near the heart of a child to be able to choose what is both good, and at the same time acceptable to all classes and kinds of children. I discovered that my little gypsy would "rather 'ave a pikcher of an 'orse!". Of course he would, because he knew all about horses. But as I walked through the school that day I saw no animal pictures of any kind.

One new but exciting innovation in our school is that children's own work is framed, in a good frame, and hung on the walls with the Gainsborough, the Renoir and the Cezanne. A certain "Rhapsody in Blue" by one of our senior scholars could easily be mistaken by a layman like myself, for a Picasso. It must be thrilling for a child to be confronted with one of his own pictures at a turn in the corridor.

The school child today is certainly encouraged and surrounded with the good and the beautiful and this must influence all those who have eyes to see and hearts and minds to appreciate. Of course we shall have those who pass heedlessly, anxious to get on with the more active business of living, but even they are perhaps unconsciously soaking up some of this gracious living.

I have only one little fear - that among all this perfection of artistic display, our children will grow too sophisticated, and lose that simplicity that has so much charm. I find that I have a certain nostalgia for the days when hot, wilting bunches of flowers were lovingly taken to a favourite teacher and crammed into the inelegant neck of a jam jar.

But I need not worry unduly for as long as we have the first year children with us there will still be the jam jars, as I discovered when I walked, one Saturday morning, through the empty classrooms, putting out the weekly stock. For there, resting on the windowsills of the first year classroom were rows of jam jars, vividly alive with buttercups and cow parsley. Perhaps not so artistically arranged as the flowers in the entrance hall, but nevertheless looking exactly "right" in all their simplicity.

And after all a broken jam jar is easily replaced. I should hate to be the poor unfortunate who breaks the ruby vase in the headmaster's room!