only 2 nativity tickets at a time, how is it done at your dcs school???

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At my dd's school this year in order to ensure fair allocation of tickets to the nativity, the school have decided to run 4 "box offices" on 4 separate afternoons after school. Tickets are 1 pound each. You can only get tickets from the boxoffice. You can only get 2 tickets from any 1 box office, you can only collect them for other parents if you have a written request from the said parent and then the name will be written on the back to ensure that you don't try to use them for yourself .

It is preferred that children under the age of 5 only attend the dress rehearsal.

The front seats at the performances are reserved for "special guests" - govenors or ex head teachers who are given tickets free of charge, do not have to que and whose tickets are reserved for them before the tickets go on sale.

My dds grandparents wanted to go and so I qued for the 1st box office for about 20 odd mins with 5 children ( aged 5 and under) and bought the tickets for them.

I then asked a friend ( and duly provided full written request ) to get 2 for me and dp for the only performance he could go too, as she would be queing and I was collecting dd an hour later that day.

I then went to the 3rd box office to get the final ticket that I needed for my dd2 to attend with us. I had no way of knowing if I would get my last ticket and without it one of us would need to stay at home with dd2

Several parents have expressed their annoyance at how the school has managed the allocation of tickets.

So can you tell me how your school managed this feat of fairness?

Were you happy with the way they organised it?

How would you feel about this schools method?

TIA

The nativity play is done by Reception, which is only half-full at this stage of the year, so only 20 families wanting to come. KS1 do a Christmas play - 2 performances and about 50 families. KS2 do a summer term play. Spreads it all out nicely.

Ds1 is in Reception, and there are 2 weeks until the play. He says they haven't done any practicing for it. Should be a good performance .

Thanks for all the replies.

Between this thread and its duplicate there have been a lot of responses.

For those who think I may have been being greedy by asking for 5 tickets I just want to clarify, the hall can seat about 100 in the audience (guestimate from the last show) there are approx 100 children in the entire school. Based on the number of children who have siblings at the school there are probably no more than 85 families at the school ( we have a fairly high proportion of families with 3/4/5 children - not much to do in the winter round here ) so as there are 4 performances the school needs to sell 400 tickets and the parent quota would only fill 170.....

I really think that the idea of raffling the front row tickets is excellent and I'm going to suggest it at the next meeting.

The whole "box office" idea is - from my point of view - a pain in the neck. In the rush to pick up the kids get home and cook tea its too easy to miss the one slot where you could have bought a ticket. I also think its very unfair to the parents who work.

tbh a quite a few of the parents at the school didn't understand the rules on how to get tickets and only found out on the morning of the last boxoffice..

Thanks again for all of the replies, hope you all have fun at the school plays....

riven sorry you're not going to make the school play this year, hope everything is ok.