‘Sponsorship money, raffles and more bloody cakes’: where’s the fun in fundraising?
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Version 0 of 1. At the time my children hit school age I braced myself for school-gate cliques (although I found none). I gritted my teeth for homework angst, best friend bust-ups and badly managed bullying. I combed leaflets on headlice, took advice on school reports and weighed up the pros and cons of school dinners versus packed lunches. By the time my four-year-old son trotted away from me in his grey shorts and red jumper, I had absorbed every piece of information available about the national curriculum, parents’ evenings and cut-price school uniforms. It wasn’t enough. Like the painful truth about childbirth, the reality of life as a primary school parent is shrouded in secrecy. It’s as though the more experienced parents are only too aware that if you knew the terrible truth about school beforehand, home education would suddenly become a more appealing prospect. The real issues of primary school weren’t in any leaflets or website or reference book. No one took me aside and told me what I really needed to know: that my time as a primary school parent would be consumed by one thing and one alone. Fundraising. In the last three years I have spent enough money on cake ingredients to make a significant contribution to society’s obesity problem, and bought enough strips of raffle tickets to open my own cloakroom. Each time I dish out yet more cash for four slices of greasy pizza at a function I don’t even want to be at, I wonder if it might not have been cheaper to have put the kids down for a penthouse suite at Eton. Like most parties, the best company at any fundraiser is to be found in the kitchen, where the organisers get to polish off the leftovers and bitch about how, yet again, it’s the same few people doing all the work. Last year’s Valentine’s Day party took weeks to arrange, with parent-teacher association members spending half the day festooning the school hall with lurid pink streamers. When the party was in full swing we did a head count: only three of the children hurling themselves around the hall belonged to parents not on the PTA. A small school is bound to have a small PTA, but even in larger schools it’s hard to find recruits. Working women cry that they are much too busy, as though those mums at home with three under-fives have all the time in the world to cut out Halloween shapes and bake Victoria sponges. Yes, mums. Sure, men do their bit too, and it’s great they can finally rock up to the playground at pick-up time without triggering a Neighbourhood Watch alert, but how many dads do you know who are active members of a PTA? Not many, and the net result is that they don’t have to do much to get a round of applause. The pressure to raise funds is continuous and intense. School trips that wouldn’t otherwise be paid for; a new projector; a World Book Day workshop. Even essential building work you would think would be paid for by the state falls on the shoulders of hard-working heads and their loyal PTAs. It’s relentless: begging letters accompany every weekly newsletter, until parents become blind to them. “I don’t look any more,” one parent confessed to me. “I know it’ll be asking for the same things: sponsorship money, raffle prizes and more bloody cakes.” School fundraisers have an extraordinary knack of successfully hitting you in the wallet not once, but twice. First comes the appeal for donations. You cough up what you can, but don’t think it’s over – now you’ve got to go to the event and buy it all back. I returned from last year’s summer fete £50 lighter and with a boot full of tat, including the home-made lemon drizzle cake I’d contributed the previous day. Some raffle items have made more comebacks than Cher. There is surely a case for cutting out the middleman. At the most recent school disco I caught the eye of a beleaguered mother trapped between the tuck shop table and the fizzy drinks; two dozen children pogo-ing around her like tiny ravers in a nightclub where E numbers are the drug of choice. “What time does it finish?” she asked, desperation in her voice. “Eight o’clock,” I said. She sighed. It was barely 6.30pm. I carted her off to the trestle table masquerading as a bar, where we nursed our just-a-small-one-I’m-driving glasses of wine. “I’d pay not to be here tonight,” she said. “How much?” I said. “A tenner? Twenty?” “More.” A child careered past, crashing against our knees and spilling something orange and suspiciously sticky on our feet. My drinking companion shuddered. “Fifty quid,” she said firmly. “I’d pay fifty quid not to be here.” I made some swift calculations. With our school discos making just £300 on a good night, the PTA could set this proposed non-attendance fee to a more palatable tenner and still be quids in. No room hire, no outlay, no headaches. Frankly I can’t understand why no one has done it before. It’s a sure-fire hit. Just don’t ask me to organise it. • Clare Mackintosh’s novel I Let You Go is published by Sphere on May 7th |