I currently have a live mouse as my front-seat passenger when I head off to school each morning. I place its transparent box on top of my pile of exercise books so that my little friend can look out of the window. Don’t worry, it’s not the same mouse each time - that would obviously be a bit odd.

So far, six of them have been caught overnight in our loft and it’s been my job to take a longer and more rural route into school and release the latest captive into the same chosen field. 

I like to think that we are being kind to that mouse family. We splashed out on a fairly luxuriant humane trap - more a two-room hotel suite than punishment cell - and each guest there has feasted well on the complimentary knob of Nutella. We would surely get top billing on TrapAdvisor.

When I have reached the field entrance and we have bade farewell, each mouse has then scuttled off excitedly across the field to start a new life. I like to think that the family have all happily reunited there.

A number of colleagues, however, howled with derision when I told them about my morning ritual. They claim that each mouse has become a bird of prey’s breakfast side order within minutes of my releasing them. One cold-hearted colleague now uses his arm to mimic a bird swooping whenever I see him. Many of them argue that humane mouse traps are not really humane at all. They prefer the more brutal, spring-loaded solution to rodent intruders.

Perhaps they are right. One of my weaknesses as a teacher is that I am not sufficiently “spring loaded”. My present morning routine says it all, really - I am too nice with mice, just as I am too nice with miscreant children. And, as with the mice, that overly kind and tolerant approach may, out in the field, not be in their long-term best interests.

That is why I would never make the grade as one of those ultra-disciplinarian “grass-flattening” teachers all over the education news at the moment. Apart from anything else, that grass-maintenance metaphor strikes me as a rather strange one to use, as demonstrated by Tes accompanying its disturbing reports with incongruously appealing images of lush, idyllic-looking lawns. To the casual eye, Tes has come to resemble Lawnmower Monthly.

The truth is that I could no more “flatten the grass” than I could flatten a mouse. I cannot really do “hard”. Any attempts at a severe and extended reprimand almost invariably lead to an unfortunate mixing-up of words, causing much-stifled laughter, not least from me. 

If my own disciplinary methods were to be described in lawn-maintenance language there would be one unavoidable conclusion: I am just not scarifying enough. The garden shed in my head seems fundamentally lacking in any of the right equipment - I have no roller, no mower and no edger to make those clearly defined borders.

It’s not that things are out of control. I am like a domesticated goat, patiently nibbling away at the grass just enough to make things manageable without things ever being quite as neat and orderly as they could be. I like to think that I make up for this with my dexterous seeding, watering and use of slow-release fertilisers, though this is probably delusional.

I certainly don’t wish I could be a grass flattener. But I do sometimes wish that my classroom could be just that little bit closer, on the grass spectrum, to immaculate lawn and a little further away from wild meadow.

Stephen Petty is head of humanities at Lord Williams’s School in Thame, Oxfordshire