It’s a very big jump for an 11-year-old.

Joining a high school with 1700 pupils after spending your entire primary education in a school with fewer than 50 is a daunting prospect.

I have two sons, one who has already made the leap from a small, rural school to a massive urban secondary, and one who will do so in the next couple of years.

No matter how confident they might be, no matter how ready their teachers believe them to be, few things are scarier for first year pupils – whether they come from a small school or not - than walking in to an unfamiliar, confusing environment full of strange faces and new rules.

What made the difference for my elder son, and what is already having an impact on the younger, is music.

My sons’ high school runs a partnership orchestra for its feeder primary schools.

It is a brilliant initiative that brings young children, who are already learning instruments in school through the local authority’s instrumental music service, up to the secondary for six weeks in the summer term.

They rehearse with the senior pupils, get to know the teachers and learn a bit about the layout of the school.

Finally, they all come together in a glorious summer concert, performing on stage to hundreds of parents, staff and families.

The music is magical, of course, but it’s the way this initiative helps with the tricky transition to high school that impresses me more.

News that some local authorities are cutting musical tuition in schools is spectacularly shortsighted.

The primary partner orchestra is just one example, but there are many more, of how music and the arts give young people opportunities they would not otherwise receive. These initiatives teach kids more about teamwork and resilience and discipline and self-esteem than any maths lesson I ever had.

I love the fact that at school, my sons have had the chance to play ukeleles and marimbas and French horns and – in the case of the little one – the euphonium, an instrument almost the same size as him. (As someone still smarting about losing out on the chance to play the flute when I was at high school, in the days when there weren’t enough instruments to go around, I am delighted so many more opportunities exist.)

It’s not just in schools – projects like the mighty Scottish Youth Theatre and Sistema Scotland’s Big Noise youth orchestra, which foster confidence and aspiration among hundreds of young people, are losing their funding. That’s a disaster.

Music matters. It shouldn’t be the preserve of the rich and the privately-educated.

But unless better and bolder decisions are made, that’s the way we’re heading.