"Don't be silly, mum, we don't dance. No-one does." My eldest daughter regaled me with this fact while she and her sister got ready for the school disco.

"Don't dance? It's a disco. Exactly what do you do?" I asked.

She explained how girls clump together in groups and occasionally get up to wander to the drinks table, while boys also sit in same-sex groups and occasionally leave their chairs to run around shouting.

"That's just like it was when I was at school," I told them.

Like most young children, they imagine their parents' youth falling somewhere between the Georgian and the Victorian eras.

"Didn't you dance with men holding you?" my youngest asked. "And wear a long dress?"

While many aspects of life have moved on since I was a nipper, school discos haven't.

The sexes are still very firmly divided.

Right through from primary to sixth form, I remember, it was girls on one side of the room, boys on the other. There might as well have been razor wire across the floor. When anyone got up to dance, as soon as the record ended, they retreated back to their own quarters.

Not surprisingly, it was a rare occurrence for members of the opposite sex to dance together. For lads in particular, the idea of a girl retreating back to her own kind to gossip - probably about his two left feet and appalling halitosis - must have been hugely off-putting.

But the girl-boy divide isn't the only thing to have remained unchanged over the past 40 years.

There's the DJ - usually resembling Phoenix Nights' Ray Von - making naff comments, and occasionally embarrassing someone with a special requests. "Someone tells me there's a birthday girl here tonight" was something no-one wanted to hear.

The DJ may have switched from giant stacks of LPs and 45s to hi-tech mixers, decks and MP3 whatsits - which have got to be easier to cart around - but despite massive advances in technology disco lights remain as basic as ever.

They continue resemble a set of horizontal traffic lights, creating as electric an atmosphere as a dentist's waiting room. In terms of atmosphere, school discos are pretty dire.

My daughters' school must have fairly decent curtains, as they always manage to achieve an acceptable level of darkness, even during the light nights of spring and summer. And you need darkness for disco lights - even dreadful ones.

At my school, the hall curtains were thinner than a sheet of loo paper. In summer, it meant some serious applying of make-up - it was so light you needed a whole pan stick to hide a spot.

The tables selling orange squash and chocolate, sweets and crisps are as I remember. We didn't have fizzy drinks either, although the sweets were probably made entirely of E-numbers.

Watching my daughters get ready brought it all back as if it was yesterday. I even remember someone standing on my foot during the special moves we did for Alvin Stardust's My Coo Ca Choo - proving that we must, at some point, have got up to dance.