The Modern School Fete vs The Traditional School Fete

The good old days of hitting a stuffed sock that was dropped into a drain pipe is long gone or the naff raffle whereupon you would win a bottle of sweet sherry that had been donated by some ones Gran even though you were only 7 years old or the excitement when you put your hand into a bucket of sawdust to get your lucky dip prize...a key ring or a fridge magnet that fell off the fridge every time someone shut the door and eating a cake that had been lovingly made by your fellow classmates and had been overly decorated with everything from their Mums food cupboard. So I went to a School Fete and has it changed?

It was a highly polished, highly commercial operation – This school fete had live animals, professional face painters, dancing bears and dinosaurs –a DJ who I think had been hired from The Ministry of Sound, extremely excitable Zumba Mums (who didn’t look like the PTA mums I remember – more like film stars that had come straight from the tanning salons of Hollywood.)  Nothing wrong with that – but I felt it was sad that there was not that down to earth community feel to it– it was all about selling and profit for companies – children are a big market and they all wanted to get straight to the source.

We had a stall, I tell you it wasn’t easy to get our stall in, it was £15 to start off with and it felt like we were pitching our stall idea in front of the dragons den, but I think they felt sorry for us and felt that our idea was “sweet” –We made badges, gave uniform away and had a toy swap, we felt very retro and very non profit making, confused a lot of people, the no charging thing! Let’s make it clear, a toy swap is where you swap your toy for another – NO IT DOES NOT COST ...Well to be honest we felt very basic against the multi million pound luxury 24 Carat gold designer fridge magnet stall across from us.

And our raffle where we were giving tickets for a day out to a family felt a bit of a small prize when there were raffles to win a holiday in New York!! Courtesy of a big brand holiday company ...Ahh so caring of them – I was wrong they do care about our schools – how much a ticket...£5 – how much did they give back to the school?... All I know is that we donated half of the proceeds back to the school.

To top things off to join in and buy from all the stalls the children’s parents would have had to take out a second mortgage or to sell the Mother in Laws Morris minor.

The funny thing was although all this had been set up, all these tempting £100 framed photos of your child stalls, or the designer jewellery stalls when I walked around the side of the school building I was greeted by the image of all the children running about laughing and having the time of their lives – what were they doing I hear you ask? Playing with 25p plastic water pistols! Says it all really....

Emily J