There are plenty of reasons to be cheerful as the new term begins. Here are just a few:

1. Seeing your colleagues

For many of us, that first day catch-up with colleagues is a real pleasure. Schools are wonderfully social environments, and ours is no exception. I really do treasure the people I work with: some are great friends, some are top team-players, many are inspirational, others are somewhat eccentric and the odd one is downright barmy.

It’s that lovely mix of people who seem to be attracted to our profession that makes a school what it is and shapes the lives of the students we teach. I miss our daily musings during the long holiday, so it’s always great to begin the banter again at the start of the year.

I suspect that the long break from each other actually helps to cement relationships - by the end of the summer term everyone is exhausted, tempers can fray and we can occasionally find ourselves being slightly more “honest” with our colleagues than is advisable. But absence makes the heart grow fonder: by September such petty squabbling is forgotten and we can get back to a happier state of relations. By the way, everything I’ve just said goes for the students 10 times over.

2. An unrealistic hope that you’ll get everything right

Many teachers aspire to perfection, and for those of us who do, there is no day more utopian than the first day back. This year, every day will be Dead Poets Society on steroids. Each lesson inspiring - indeed, each lesson planned in advance. I will talk less, the students will contribute more, achieving self-actualisation at least once every hour. Every book will be marked in at least four different colours to denote different skills, and no worksheet will remain loose.

All resources will be ready the day before - no more will you find me in the photocopy room angrily ripping mis-fed paper from the machine at 8.59am. Never again will I show that video on glaciation from 1986. All my resources will be updated and contemporary, embedded clips in PowerPoint presentations ready to click and play rather that grabbed last-minute from a swift YouTube trawl.

This joyous sense of utopia may be unrealistic but it’s actually very healthy, reflecting the progressive tendencies of the teacher who is always looking to self-improve. The fact that reality gets in the way is a shame, but as my dear mother says: “Of the 100 things you are expected to do in the average teaching week, getting about 70 done is a massive success.”

3. It’s the one day of the year when you have a tidy desk

Like many of us, I find it very satisfying to begin with a tidy desk. No half-empty coffee mugs, no confiscated phones, no random piles of paper - just a blank canvas. It encourages belief in the vague possibility that I may even keep it that way for the year. Maybe those labelled trays will actually have the right stuff kept in them? Maybe I’ll even file my leftover photocopies and not just stack them higgledy-piggledy?

It’s good to dream, at least for a day. Of course, the truth is it won’t take me long to resort to what a senior colleague describes as the standard teacher’s desk system. His sage advice is thus: “You have this week’s pile. At the end of the week, you add that to the monthly pile. At the end of the month, you add that to the six-monthly pile. And after six months, if you still haven’t done anything with it, you tip that into the bin - the recycling one of course.”

Still, you never know, this could be the year when everything is different…

4. New threads

Maybe I’m alone in this, and maybe I’m a bit vain and a touch metrosexual, but I still rather like buying myself some new shirts for the autumn. A new suit, perhaps, or a dapper tie and some smart brogues. I think it sets the right tone for me and for my students.

Walking in sporting some new threads all adds to that sense of a fresh start. It usually lasts just long enough for me to savour it before I clumsily splatter coffee all over my tie, looking down to see I also have board-pen marks on the once-white cuffs of my shirt.

Sometime soon, I may become the middle-aged teacher who wears the same faded shirt on the first day back, reflecting somewhat faded aspirations for the year - but it hasn’t happened yet and I plan on keeping it that way.

5. The weird and wonderful world of the ‘needs list’

One of the odder highlights of the first day back is that moment when teaching staff are introduced with bated breath to the list of needs for our new intake of students.

Now, as someone who would make the top five of any special educational needs list in terms of my own disability, I obviously realise that this a serious document, helping us to understand who has what condition and how to ensure they get the best education possible.

However, it also acts as a kind of annual barometer of just how mad and mollycoddling the education world has become. It is truly fascinating and often hilarious to read out loud the oddities listed by the schools that previously had care of our little darlings. I’ve been told its real, but I’m still pretty dubious about the sudden explosion of cases of “oppositional defiance disorder” appearing on lists as if this were a communicable disease.

A friend of mine was puzzled by the instruction “don’t let him overheat” next to the name of one child, with no explanation given. Another favourite was the phrase “allergic to eels” - leading all those in the room to wonder how precisely a child might come into contact with eels in a school, let alone be specifically allergic to this kind of fish alone.

6. Senior leadership buzzword bingo

When writing this article, I consulted social media, and number one by miles in terms of popularity was this one. Basically, the idea is this: take your bingo card and fill in each square with all the latest in-vogue phrases, then tick them off one by one during staff training on the first day back.

Now, I must confess that I am very lucky at my current school in terms of not having experienced the tedium of sitting through a dirge of awful management speak, but if my social-media responses are anything to go by, this is a big issue for most of our profession.

It sounds as though buzzword bingo might be the ray of light that gets many people through this tirade of verbal diarrhoea: a small moment of childishness that keeps them smiling despite attempts by senior leaders to drain their enthusiasm before the term even begins.

7. Meeting your students

Well I suppose they need a mention, don’t they? Seeing students walk into your classroom on day one is really what we all do it for. What makes the autumn term so exciting for a teacher is knowing just what treats they have in store for them in the year ahead.

The only feeling that I can relate it to is when you introduce a friend to a great book, movie or album - you know what’s coming their way and how it will grab them. Times that feeling by a hundred and that’s what is so great about teaching.

I love receiving my new A-level sociology and politics students, knowing they are yet to have their minds stretched and strained by grappling with the complexities that await, and knowing that their responses to these great issues will help to shape their values, their character and, ultimately, the impact they have on the world.

If you want only one reason to look forward to the new term - one reason to focus on to drown out the stress and keep you at the top of your game - make it this one.

Tom Finn-Kelcey is head of social sciences at Queen Elizabeth’s Grammar School in Faversham, Kent. He tweets @TFinnKelcey