Is this school normal?

[pinkiepie1]

Does anyone else's primary school charge to see their childrens concerts?

DD is 5 and had her Xmas concert. The teacher has her favourites so they were in the play while 12 other 5-6 year olds were just sat quietly shoved in a corner.

It doesn't bother me too much about the favourites, this is about the fact we had to pay for tickets to see our dd sit on the floor for 40 minutes.

Then we got offered to buy her work.
I felt like a bad parent but I didn't buy half of her stuff.

Is this just the norm now? Or is dd school just trying to get as much money as they can?

cloudpop they were all performing. I've never seen a play where children weren't all on stage.

PoutySprout I didn't think this was a particularly high amount! Our events are:
• Monthly cake&cookies sale. 50p each or three for £1. Parents or grandparents bake or buy and donate. We make about £200
• Quiz and Curry night. £10 pp. We get an alcohol licence, buy beer and wine, sell for double the price ie buy wine at £5 a bottle, sell for £10. Parent cooks huge pots of curry and rice.
• Christmas Fayre. Usual stalls and games. Bought a Nintendo Switch, begged other prizes, had raffle tickets books printed and sold £1,500.
Photos with Father Christmas. We invested in a F.C. suit a few years ago. We make the corner of the library a grotto with Xmas trees and lights. A parent good at taking photos takes them, get them printed very cheaply and we charge £2 each plus £1 for extra copies. Kids get a small, very cheap wrapped present. Try Baker Ross for tat.
• Summer Fayre on school field. Bouncy castle and lots of games and stalls
• Sports Day (and some other events) Starbucks donate a large container of coffee plus cups, milk and sugar and stirrers. We charge £1 a cup so 100% profit. Buy a box of 48 packets of crisps for £4.50, sell for 30p a packet. Similar deal with small bottles of water and cartons of juice. Costco is our friend😊
• At most events we sell hot dogs and burgers. BBQ run by an enthusiastic father and it makes quite a bit of money.
It all takes a bit of planning but we do the same thing each year so everyone knows how things are done and what's involved. New PTA members and helpers soon catch on.

We only have 5 regular volunteers, all of whom work. We just couldn’t do all of that.

PoutySprout there are only six of us! Five work full time and I'm retired.* The hard part is getting people to volunteer to help and stop them seeing the PTA as an exclusive little club.* We have a FB page 'our school' PTA.
We try to make it chatty and keep parents informed about what school needs, how much money is raised at each event, what the school has requested that we raise funds for.**
We network like crazy on social media. Once you've got the framework of events in place for the first year it's just a matter it repeating and tweaking it from then on.
And you need to be relentlessly enthusiastic even when you don't feel like it😄

Yep. We do all that. December has wiped me out. Haven’t stopped since 27th November and still have video to edit over Xmas so people can order in the new year.

Does it really matter if a school charges for the nativity rather than running lots of PTA events, surely it evens out over time? Those advocating a free nativity whilst mentioning their wonderful PTA fundraising are perhaps in more affluent areas than they realise. Our 230 pupil school (within 10% most deprived LAs in England) raises £1k a year, and there are still issues for some parents with too many requests for money/paid events. However inventive your fundraising is, to raise £5k or £10k or £25k (which I've seen on MN before) your community has to have money to start with.