ABSTRACT
The features of the schools which pupils anticipated with pleasure, and the fears they had were the same in all three studies, and appear to be remarkably constant across time and space. The ORACLE pupils showed a similar range of enthusiasms. Pupils anxious about the buildings at their destination school were usually focusing on their size and complexity. The size of the destination schools was related to their specialist facilities, which emphasized to the children the wider curriculum that they would soon be facing. Pupils had anxieties of two kinds about the curriculum in the transfer schools: that the work would be hard, and about specific new subjects. There is one item in the anticipated curriculum about which pupils’ more extreme fears crystallize — the dissection of a rat. Brunvand is an expert on urban folk tales and legends, such as ‘the hook’, ‘the vanishing hitchhiker’ and ‘the spider in the beehive hairdo’.
