Don’t let them eat cake

Why schools’ approach to charity needs to change.

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Buns and brownies sold in the interval of the end of year performance. School discos fuelled by caster sugar.

Children in Need? Cake.

Red Nose Day? Cake.

Wear-Your-Pyjamas-For-No-Apparent-Reason day? Cake.

At the school my boys attend, we’re quick to jump on the bandwagon of charitable endeavour — but its wheels are oiled with golden syrup.

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Some context: my two sons — aged three and five — go to the local village primary school.

It’s straight out of a Janet and Allan Ahlberg book. They have Music and Movement with piano accompaniment in the hall every Tuesday and bacon sandwiches on a Friday for the princely sum of 50p.

To avoid any confusion, it’s a glorious place.

I’m also a Governor — what can I say, I love sitting on tiny chairs — and we’ve been awaiting our SIAMS inspection with feverish anticipation for some time now.

(For the uninitiated: SIAMS is a bit like Ofsted, but with a focus on how a school delivers its Christian vision. For a Church of England school, it’s a big deal.)

We’ve been considering how we measure up against the inspection criteria for months now. And there are some big ol’ concepts and questions in there.

Do we help students develop an understanding of disadvantage, deprivation and the exploitation of the natural world? Encourage them to question injustice? To engage in social action?

We do some of those things. In fact, we do some of them really well. But over the course of our discussion, something became glaringly apparent.

When it comes to charity, we have a tendency to rely on cake.

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“It’s only cake!” I hear you cry. “Whaddya want? Gruel? Sackcloth and ashes?”

Well, no. Not quite. But I do wonder why we expect a three year old — or a five year old, for that matter — to make the connection between helping someone less fortunate and a sweet treat.

It just doesn’t seem the most effective way to draw the connection between hardship and our desire to do something.

Truthfully? It feels simplistic — indulgent, even.

There are other issues, too. There’s the futility of the Parental Cake Cycle. As well-meaning, middle-class mums and dads, we all feel obliged to be involved. And so we all buy the ingredients for cake.

Then we all make a cake.

Then we all buy a cake — several, perhaps.

Money moves around in a large, pointless circle when we’d have achieved precisely the same outcome by putting the money we were going to spend on flour and cocoa powder and sugar sprinkles in a tin in reception labelled ‘NOT CAKE.’

Actually, not precisely the same outcome: we’d have spent less time in the supermarket, less time cajoling our kids to wash their hands and consumed fewer calories. In a world where 1 in 3 children are overweight or obese by 11, that’s something worth thinking about.

And what about the waste? Stale buns left over at the end of the day going for 20p. 10p. Free to a good home.

Finally — and this is perhaps my most vehement criticism of the charity bake sale — it’s just not very imaginative. There are so many fun, creative, active and mindful ways to raise money for charity — even — especially — involving young children. Car-washing. Spelling bees. Sponsored knits. Snail-racing.

Snails. Racing! What’s not to like?

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When I was Head of English at the British School of Brussels, the Head of Secondary took a very dim view of charity cake.

“What does Rocky Road teach them about deprivation?” he’d ask, theatrically.

We’d roll our eyes. Initially. Gradually, we gave way. Man hadda point.

OK, so BSB was a magical, leafy-lane fairytale of a school with 70+ nationalities on roll, generous departmental budgets and a cosy, liberal feel — all of the staff from the Principal to the caretakers were known by their first names.

Yes, our students were wealthy by most definitions of the word. But instead of the sense of elitism and superiority often associated with pupils at independent schools in the UK (sometimes unfairly), ours were sensitive to their privilege.

They had to be. BSB was built in the shadow of the Africa Museum, King Leopold II’s propaganda tool for his colonial passion project, stuffed with stolen artefacts from the Belgian Congo.

In the entrance hall there were several gilt statues of African children with swollen bellies kneeling at the feet of wealthy Belgian benefactors. It took that kind of angle. The circa-1900 angle. I wrote something about it here.

The school charity — a student-led organisation called The Best of Both — formed a partnership between BSB and four schools in Bolgatanga, Ghana. The relationship was intended to be fully collaborative, with the Ghanaian side suggesting project areas where BSB could support rather than help being ‘imposed’ from BSB’s end.

There was an emphasis on cultural exchange, with trips from Bolgatanga to Brussels and vice versa and both sides committed to learning from experience of working together. The committee — all teenagers — came up with a constant stream of inventive ways to raise funds while increasing awareness of the challenges these schools faced and celebrating Ghana’s rich culture.

They encouraged the school cafeteria to ‘Go Ghanaian’ with their menu for the day and donate their profits.

Students across the school filled sweet tubes with spare change for the ‘Smarties’ campaign, raising money for classroom desks.

They sold sunglasses for an project delivering hundreds of free eye tests.

The entire primary school dressed in red, green, yellow and black and arranged themselves as a Ghanaian flag for an aerial photo.

It wasn’t perfect, and some ideas were more successful than others — one ill-fated initiative saw the students design and sell charity-branded bottled water before single-use plastic had entered the public consciousness as a major environmental scourge.

But by and large, it was carefully thought-out and achieved much of what it set out to do.

And so here’s our challenge: translating this to the context of a rural East Yorkshire primary school with some serious cake dependency issues. Wish us luck.

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Want some help with your charity strategy? I have plenty of ideas that go beyond cake. Let’s talk.