school plays - ticket limitations!

[gremlindolphin]

How many people are allowed to go to your children's school plays?

We have just been told that this year we are only allowed 2 tickets per family due to health and safety reasons! The 2 plays are on twice.

So no Grannies etc, everyone in outrage as you can imagine. Siblings are ok if they sit on your lap which kind of defeats the H&S argument to my mind?

4 per family, then whatever's left go on sale after a week.

We have the same rules at ours. People can put in a request for extra tickets though, and if there are anly left then they will be allocated first come forst served i think.

well the hall is only so big and would have a max number of people.

i dread school assemblies and plays - too many crying babies who aren't taken out, school children on stage speaking their lines drowned out by toddlers having tantrums. And parents standing up crowding you out to get a picture of their precious child. no fun i say!

no grandparents nearby so 2 tickets fine. why not ask at the office for spares?

2 here too

Ours is the same but I tend to go to the dress rejearsal during the day so it frees up the tickets or offer to help with coffee and mince pies so you just turn up and nab an extra seat.

Yes, only allowed two - no grandparents locally so it was never an issue . Having had to stand very uncomfortably through a school performance recently I am very pleased that they have these rules.

I'm guessing the H&S rule is about the number of chairs they are allowed to put in the hall then, not the number of people. The H&S rules are not the school's fault.

Top tip - sit in the back row. Then you can stand up to see, and take photos. If you sit in the middle you don't get to see a thing!

Oh, and I invited my parents to come to ds1's play, and have dinner with us afterwards (it's at 2pm and they live an hour away, both retired).

They said no . Not that they came to any of mine either, but I was hoping they might have mellowed a bit!

We get two tickets, one for each performance. This leads to a weird 'black market'-esque situation where random parents approach you and try to get you to swap tickets for the preferred time. Much haggling ensues. My friend got taken out for a coffee AND bought a danish in order to secure her spare ticket.

Always had to do this for numbers' sake - in reality we never enforced it strictly and wouldn't turn people away, but it at least made sure we had a relatively equal distribution among all the performances rather than everyone all showing up for the same performance on a whim!

Sadly they haven't invented a way to build school halls out of elastic walls yet.

To stop the standing up factor we had to request that no one took photos mid-performance and that the camcorder crew went to the back to do this - and made the kids available for parents to take as many dressed up photos as they liked at the end. Otherwise you get some inconsiderate idiot who picks a seat in the middle and then stands up the entire way through to get the perfect camcorder angle of his kid excavating their left nostril all the way through! (GO TO THE BACK AND STOP SPOILING EVERYONE ELSE'S VIEW!!!)

Every school hall will have been set a legal maximum number of chairs/members of the public and woe betide you if you have too many, it invalidates your insurance should anything go wrong. We have a limit of 2 tickets per family and then a waiting list with requests for more! We have a dress rehearsal-littlies welcomed, afternoon( ie the granny performance) and evening performance ( littlies not banned but everyone knows this is the "quiet! one !)

We had an entire mini-bus of relatives show up one year because they'd never had a Mary in the family before!

2 per family. The hall won't fit any more! We have 2 performances as well, one with a creche and one where small children are welcome.

Well if it's on for 2 nights I don't see the problem...my Mum goes on a seperate night.

This year school is doing 4 performances. One for grandparents & siblings, one for Reception parents, one for Y1 parents and one for Y2 parents and asks everyone to 'try to fit in with this'.

I don't know whether this means siblings are banned from the other performances and don't want to ask in case the answer is no! I did think of smuggling DD in dressed in DS's school uniform. Shes only a few weeks younger than lots of the reception children. Wonder what school would make of an extra one?!

There has to be a limit somehow, unless those poor children do the play every night for two weeks.

You certainly wouldn't want that.

Gremlin- out of interest how would you organise it better?

2 per family here, total that is, not each performance.

2 per family for the infants, and only toddlers and parents and the junior school invited to the dress rehearsal (and I know why after the last time they let anyone go to that one, no children could see). For the juniors it is 3 per family, but they do lots of performances. You can then request extras if there are any free.
Infants is filmed, so Grandparents can see the DVD.

hi thanks for all your thoughts.

I am sure that it was forced on the school rather than the Head's vicious idea to make people buy the dvd - the current conspiracy theory on FB!

Interesting that its about chairs rather than people.

Its the first year there's been a limit and I think it would have been a good idea to do an extra's waiting list so perhaps I'll suggest that next time.

God I hate when entire entourages turn up, smiling and calling to the child who is usually away in the back row hidden behind someone else.

Our school has a showing for the nursery children and younger siblings. Then the rest of the performances are for adults only. Only 2 tickets are given out per child and you can go on a waiting list for spares.

This is to do with fire regulations - we have the same restrictions.

We have 2 tickets allocated per family for the 3 performances. If there are spares then you can buy more.
300 children, 600 adults = not enough room for everyone at each performance.

And that 2 tickets includes toddlers. SO either I go with DD2, or DH goes with DD2, but we can't go altogether.

At Dd's school they do 2 performances, one afternoon, and one evening, we can have 2 tickets for each.

So My mum and MIL will go in the afternoon, and Dh and I will go in the evening.

Unfortunately, at dd's Italian nursery, there were no limits. In a smallish room, with each family (except mine) bring both sets of grandparents, aunts, uncles, cousins and random strangers picked up on the street. There were buses pulling up I tell ya.

It was Dante's 7th Circle.