Let’s call the annual purchase of a Christmas present for your child’s teacher what it is – a chance to suck up to them.
I’ve never been into it. I’ve never bought a gift or chipped in to the class fund to get something bigger.
Until now.
I’ve learnt that I need to play the game. Parental school involvement is a competition and for my child to get ahead, I need to be smarter.
I didn’t care to play this game, but then my daughter didn’t get the role she wanted in the school play. Not even her third choice? She has instead been assigned “townsperson number five”. Not even the dignity of a named character. Not even a position within the top three unnamed townspeople. Not even a lowly, but adorable, barnyard animal. What did I do wrong?
Why was I asked to rank the her top three choices, and fill out forms, like they were university applications, if they weren’t going to give her any of their choices?
I can’t help but wonder if it’s because of my low engagement with school life. I don’t volunteer for the PTA. Or help with the Christmas fair. Or the summer one. I only donated a bottle of buck’s fizz for the tombola, priced at £2.19. Is that the problem? Is that why we have been assigned the lowest ranking townperson?
Is it because I don’t grab the headteacher in the car park every morning for a chat – like the volunteers who spend so much time at the school they might as well get a job there and be done with it.
So, this month when one mum started the annual ring around to collect money for a gift, I knew her game. Get one big thing, write everyone’s name on the card – and hand it in yourself to get all the recognition and favour with the teacher. Well, not this year.
This year, I’m going to win. Like they say, if you can’t beat them, well, you really need to try harder.
So, this year we have decided to instead gift a modest hamper from Fortnum & Mason’s. A clear winner, but not too flashy to be desperate either. The decision was carefully analysed over the kitchen island with my husband.
Mind you, if I really wanted to win, I’d just hand our teacher a white envelope containing the names of the parents who talk about her in the group chat. But I’d be promptly ejected from the WhatsApp, and might not receive many party invites afterwards.
And then I’d be losing key intel. The author of The Art of War Sun Tzu warned against dismantling your own spy network: “He who lacks spies is blind”. And in primary school, blindness means not knowing who’s secretly doing private tutoring.
It doesn’t help that our teachers keep describing the class as a “very high-achieving year group”. Because they’re five, but also because it means you have to do extra work just to keep up. It only ups the parental panic. I overheard one parent tell their child they’d “never get a good job” if they “carried on like this” at drop-off one morning.
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And this anxiety translates into pressure for children to perform well, to perform better than other children, to compete with peers. And naturally, by extension for parents to compete with parents. The playground is a battlefield. It’s a mum-eat-mum world.
I find myself counting how many times other children get a “star of the week” award compared to mine, which are announced every week on the newsletter. She also tells me she has never been the “class helper” but that another girl gets chosen “all the time”.
I want to say, “let’s all fight fair here”. Let’s call off the arms race. But I can’t trust anyone. I have enemies at the gates. The school gates, that is. So I’m gearing up. I’m winning the Christmas gift this year.
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