At this time of year, I fondly remember some of the summer activities that I organised at school during my teaching years. We had some fabulous school trips in the summer, although obviously these went on throughout the year. The Sports Days should have documented by the media, such was their high level of humour. I shall return to these shortly.
There were also the Summer Fairs though, and what a nightmare they so frequently were.
Yesterday as I drove passed my old school, I noticed a small insignificant sign stating that they were holding their school fair that very day. I peeped down the side road expecting to see the hoards of people amassing but couldn’t really see. Had I not been in a hurry I might have popped my head around the corner to see what was going on and whether the fair was anything like the ones we used to have.
My colleagues loathed and detested the fairs. They were quite ridiculously miserable about them, considering that they didn’t actually have to do very much for it at all. That little task somehow landed at my feet, being as I was the only member of the teaching staff who regularly attending the PTA meetings. What started in my first year of teaching as the representative member of staff soon turned out into “Ms. I feel as though I ought to” who took control of the organisation committee and ran the whole damn event, massively supported by some brilliant and wonderful parents who dedicated hours and hours of unpaid work to make the things happen.
The first year that I was in sole charge of the event was terrifying. I got my Makro card, traipsed down to the infamous Cash ‘n’ Carry and bought far too much stuff for the stalls and raffle prizes. I kept holding onto the “Speculate to Accumulate” policy but when it came to the day I realised that I had spent a little more than intended and was then just sitting there, hoping upon hope that I would not end up with egg on my face, that the sun would shine brilliantly and I would be vindicated from the few people who did not agree with my policy.
It was a truly fabulous day. We raised twice as much money as we had ever done; £2000 in those days was a hell of a lot of money in an area that, whilst not deprived was certainly not affluent.
But the money, quite frankly, was incidental. The main point of the day was to bring the school community together in a purposeful but enjoyable way. The pub at the end of the road was approached to see if they could donate a couple of barrels of beer whilst also helping us to apply for a licence to sell the stuff. All manner of stalls were set up with certain teachers ‘bagging’ their specific one year in year out. Children delighted in the freedom of being in the school playground without any specific rules being in place. Parents and carers sweated over steamy barbecues and the head teacher and one of the parents fought over who was going to oversee the music.
One year, there were water stocks and all of the teachers refused to take part. In retrospect, it probably was a rather divisive thing to stick in the school playground but it didn’t half raise a lot of money, especially the year that the local fire brigade came along and we had a series of hunky men getting wet and stripping down with a range of hormonal women lining up with their sponges in hand. As for me, my first trip in the stocks was greeted with a £5 bucket from one of my parents who threw the water at my face with some force. He was a man typical of the area where he had spent all of his life, and I was beginning to think that he seriously wanted to injure me. He laughed and then decided to come back for more. What had I ever done to him?
Well, apparently I had done nothing to him at all. He was just so delighted that I had put myself in the firing line. In a bizarre way, his respect grew for me because of this and even now when I occasionally bump into him in the pub, he delights in telling all his drinking partners about the time when I was such a good sport as he showered me with freezing cold water, complaining nearly twenty years on that I was wearing a bathing costume rather than a T-shirt so that he couldn’t get the effects of a private Wet T-shirt competition!
Good times though. I still cannot understand why teachers in a school do not fully engage in the community with which they are serving. School fairs were a vital part of belonging in my opinion. Sharing the work with the parents and carers whose efforts would benefit the children directly as well as give us teachers an added extra to make our jobs more viable seemed an obvious thing to do.
As I eventually stepped back and let other people take over the organisation, I still maintained a role and I loved seeing these exceptional people working collaboratively and learning much about themselves and developing confidence in success. But nothing was as important as this joint working together, sharing, enjoying and providing the children with an enjoyable day.
As for me, I got stuck for years on the raffle because of a) my anal organisation skills in setting up a system for the squillions of prizes we ended up with and b) because it was deemed that I was the only person in school who knew every child’s name and the large majority of the parents too.
Mmmm. Not sure what that actually says about me!
So I didn’t pop into the school yesterday. Instead I went to a different type of ‘fair’, and in many ways, a far more agreeable one because there was no ulterior motive to the event in so far that it had no fundraising factor. This was merely a street party, organised on an annual basis to ensure that the occupants of the road could get to know one another and socialise together at least once a year, plus of course the organisation meetings that needed to take place in order for the event to be a success.
The street was closed to traffic; gazebos, paddling pools, sandpits, volleyball nets and food/drink stalls were set up. Music was blasting out without being invasive. A photographer stood at the end of the road taking photos of the residents dressed up in Arabian costume. Mingling groups shyly opened up conversations and within a few minutes were rocking their heads back in ease at the humour that was being shared between them. Discussions were had about the interior design of the houses, reflecting the different creativity and personality of the people within. The food contributions were sensational; my very favourite type of eating – a mixture of everything. It all worked like clockwork despite there being no specific organisation as to who was going to bring sweet or savoury dishes along. The postman and the milkman were invited along as integral people to the way the street operated. The children were gathered together in the gazebo to give a semi-impromptu rendition of “Children of the Revolution”, and the sun gleamed through the sparse clouds to reveal a perfect day for sitting on the steps of the house and watching this microcosm of society working and living together.
If I am honest, I was a little envious. I quickly looked up and down the street to see if there were any houses for sale because this is exactly the type of place that I feel I would like to live; the centre of a busy borough, multicultural, though not necessarily reflected as such in this particular street party, gorgeous Victorian houses that are steeped in history and accompanying stories. In fact I would love to research a road such as this to see what stories lie behind those London brick houses that have been standing proud for well over a hundred years.
THIS is what community should be about. This is what living together in a collective manner should be about, and in many ways, it shouldn’t be left to one day a year. However, there must be positive repercussions of such an event; more people knowing one another, more people available for one another in times of need, more people sharing the joys of their lives. THIS is what the Big Society should be like and where it should originate from, not a contrived theory placed upon us as some kind of cost-cutting experiment.
And this is precisely the sort of outcome that I wanted, and indeed saw, when I was organising the school fairs all those years ago.
Back to school though and as I was passing by the school yesterday, my mind wandered to other summer activities that we organised in school. The most hysterical one had to be Sports Day.
It was the epitome of organised chaos. How they ever worked, I will never know but they were hysterical – there is no other word for it.
My mum and dad happened to be in London for my first Sports Day at the school. I can distinctly remember looking across to my father whose jaw was permanently open as he glanced from one disorganised chaos to another. Years later he still giggled at the astonishing success of the day and how it truly was the very best Sports Day he had ever been to in his life, and remember that he had organised about 30 of them during his years in education.
It is difficult to explain why it was so disorganised and higgledy-piggledy because there was a hell of a lot of organisation involved. We didn’t want the children hanging around getting sunburnt. We also didn’t want it to be some major competition either. Every single pupil took part in at least two events. Different years brought different ways of organising it but there was always some field events as well as track and we also created an obstacle/climbing area that the children could also go along to. Therefore there were people meandering around all over the place, with parents coming along too, intermingled with the kids rather than separated by the tied-together ropes that you see so frequently at school sports days, where parents and carers are pinned into their cordoned off area unable to really share the moment with their offspring.
It was a real community event. Such a pity that the soulless woman who took over the school thought that this event was not a necessity and stopped it at the earliest opportunity.
Honestly, some people just have no idea, they really don’t.
Recently the government has released some new guidelines for school trips.
Apparently, the teaching unions are a little concerned about the dilution of the existing document, I assume because they are worried that it could cause litigation problems for their members but I do not know enough about it to make a valid comment
http://www.bbc.co.uk/news/education-14003616
Now I know that I have not read the documents, merely skimmed them and there is a genuine concern that some people may be more reluctant to do school trips if they do not feel that they have the backing of clear legislation. However, there are also a number of teachers who will be more likely to take a trip with their children without, what they might have seen in the past, the restrictions and rules that were such a myriad of regulations that one felt somewhat concerned about taking the kids out at all.
There are many teachers who are risk averse. They always have been. I remember during the IRA bombing campaign, I was all for taking my children up to London but my colleagues decided it was too risky. I tried to point out the laws of probability to them and the fact that there were numerous schools immediately adjacent to the sites I wanted to take the children to but this was dismissed as being too risky. And this was before anything had actually happened on transport sites despite the warnings of attacks on the underground and regular evacuations.
Having said that I was far more risk averse than my head teacher, who let the children run around all over the place and rarely did a head count. I have to say though, he never lost a child and never encountered an injury – but that could have been luck rather than anything else.
It is all about balance.
But these trips away from school, be they residential or a quick trip down to the local park are a vital, essential part of their educational experience.
Do you remember your school trips? I know I do, and they were sadly few and far between. I am delighted to say that the children who I taught were regularly taken out; termly at the very least and whilst they are always hard work to plan and ensure they run like clockwork, they were also amongst the most rewarding parts of the job.
As for residential trips, we always used to take the Year 6 group away in late May or June, with Year Five and Four going the week or two after. Whilst it was wonderful to go away at this time of year, i still feel that the optimum time for doing a residential with children is in the beginning of the autumn term, as you do develop a different relationship with children who you are spending 24 hours a day with. It is wonderful, and even now as I write, I am dipping in and out of my memory bank remembering the looks on the childrens’ faces, the experiences that they had, the laughter, the learning. I could cry, I really could. It was so bloody wonderful.
I would be the last one to commend this government for anything that they do, especially if it has Michael Gove’s name on it, but I will read these documents and see whether they are more rational than the previous ones. Sometimes, I fear that the unions may be a little too reticent to back changes because actually, it is damn hard work doing school trips. I know that this is an unfair indictment but we must look sensibly at any way in which there is greater ease at enabling teachers to take children far away from the constraints of the classroom and get out there to enjoy the utter pleasure of seeing every sense and every ounce of wonderment in a child’s eye who is experiencing something new, for the first time.
We really must ensure that we legislate for that.
So, summer time. Lots of memories, lots of reminders as to how communities should be working together, have been working together – now and in the past.
Community is vital and within working together, you get such a buzz, indeed a natural high for yourself seeing the value and the worth of collective organisation.
I am sure that the people who organised the street party yesterday are waking this morning (with a little hangover or two) with the loveliest of feelings that they were an integral part in this community activity.
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