Going back to school after the long summer break always left me with a leaden feeling of dread in the pit of my stomach.

I knew some kids, usually of the jolly hockey sticks variety, who couldn't wait to tumble back into the classroom to see their pals, compare pencil cases ("Look everyone, it's got a special compartment for my Holly Hobby rubber!") and exaggerate uncontrollably about their adventures, japes and escapades during the six-week holiday. Unfortunately I was not one of them.

I was always among that group of slightly scruffy, shuffling, mumbling creatures who took the art of dawdling to a whole new level and who could make a 20-minute stroll to school last a good hour - more if we made a pit-stop to refuel on Vimto and TicTacs at Mr Ali's newsagents-cum-gossipmongers.

During my primary school days, Mum would line me up with the other kids in the street - in strict height order of course - for our annual back-to-school photograph before I was allowed to mooch miserably off in my squeaky patent leather shoes, pulling petulantly at my elasticated red tie and almost garrotting myself in the process.

By the time I reached the heady heights of middle school, Mum had given up trying to make me say cheese and took up waving from the window instead, a task she took on with gusto, frantically semaphoring her farewells until I was a mere dot on the horizon, invisible to the human eye. I completely ignored her of course, concentrating instead on trying to walk slower than Fiona, Damian and Matthew (my dawdling buddies for four long years) who were barely moving themselves.

At high school, well, to be perfectly honest, they were lucky if I turned up at all.

In summary then, you could say that I wasn't exactly cock-a-hoop when the summer holidays ended and the new school year began. I was a lazy swine who yawned in the face of academia and, as such, am very lucky that I was a pupil of the Seventies and Eighties.

Back then, we had a test or two at primary level (spellings, times-tables and sticking screwed up bits of coloured tissue on to sugar paper), and some end-of-year exams at middle school to discover which pupils had actually stayed awake in which lessons. But there was only one set of "real" exams, exams that actually meant something, we had to face, and those were our O-levels.

By the time these came along we were 16 and we were ready. But now things have changed and not, in my opinion, for the better.

Our children are now being tested at six (and seven, and eight...) not just 16, parcelled up as either academic or non-academic when they are barely out of the sandpit. And the reason? Simple: we are a nation addicted to league tables, to comparing and contrasting anything and everything until it fits into neat little boxes marked "good" and "bad". We've had our fill of "good schools" and "bad schools", and of "good hospitals" and "bad hospitals", so now we are putting our table-addled brains to further nonsensical use by packing our children into our neatly-labelled compartments.

At six and seven, children should be learning to enjoy learning, not panicking about revision and Sats scores. In fact, scores, exams, pass and fail are words that should simply not be part of their vocabulary.

Exams have their place, but not in a junior school classroom. They are completely irrelevant and tell us little, if anything, about a child's true capabilities.

One recent exam question for six-year-olds, which was relayed to me by a teaching assistant, presented the children with a circle cut up into eight equal slices like a perfectly cooked cake of which they had to colour-in a quarter.

On collecting up the papers, my friend was surprised to find that the least-able children in the class had actually carried out the task perfectly, while most of the others had struggled, scribbled a bit and then given up. She asked the "good" children, those who had passed and were surely on their way to academic greatness, how they had solved the problem.

"Well," said one, rummaging in his nose thoughtfully, "I coloured in two slices and then, well, erm, I couldn't be bothered to do anymore."

A budding genius? Probably not, but who cares, he's only six for goodness sake. He and the rest of his schoolmates should be allowed to dawdle awhile, to ponder and play, without getting bogged down in Sats and scores. Children are not children for long these days, so why not let them enjoy it while it lasts?