If the wonders of the World Wide Web are to be believed, today is National Cabbage Day. Of course, I’m sure that those of you still in school this week will have been celebrating it, so don’t need me to remind you. One can imagine the delights: dressing up as your favourite cabbage (I’m a fan of red, myself); taking photos of family members eating cabbage in unusual places; perhaps a special assembly with an invited guest speaker who works on a cabbage farm?
Sadly, it’s been half-term week for us so we’ve not been able to join in all the cabbage-based fun from our beds and tea rooms, but it must have been happening, right? After all, there’s little a school loves more than getting involved with an event.
What do you mean you didn’t take part?
Perhaps that’s because we’re already rather overwhelmed by special event days. Who has time for cabbages when we’ve got Safer Internet Day and World Book Day to fit in. And, of course, nobody could argue that cabbages are more important than online safety or reading.
And yet, we seem to play those two down so much. How is it that something so integral to the heart of education as reading and something so vital for modern life as cyber-security can be reduced to an assembly and a few activities on a one-off day? Surely they both deserve more than that? Not simply a day, or even a week, but to be at the heart of what we do. And if they really are at the centre of things, what on earth does a dressing-up day add?
I’m all in favour of dressing up on occasion. Some of my fondest memories with former colleagues are of the dramatic costumes obtained for the staff pantomime, or the efforts the children went to for an elaborate class assembly. But dressing up as the eponymous character from Where’s Wally for another year doesn’t really strike me as the route to inspiring a love of reading, any more than PowerPoint slides delivered by the head will secure our children’s safety.
Serious about e-safety
If we’re serious about a safer internet, then we need e-safety to be a constant thread through our curriculum - and I don’t just mean during a one-off ICT lesson at the start of the year. We should be reiterating the points whenever the internet is in use, whether it’s accessing online times tables tests or viewing YouTube videos about the Vikings.
Children need to see teachers modelling sensible approaches to internet use - pointing out the merits of social media, but being honest about its limitations. We need to work with parents and help them to understand what children are accessing on their phones and tablets in their bedrooms.
The same is true of reading. Fine, dress up if you want to, but don’t imagine for a second that it’s making your school into a “reading school”. A love of books and reading won’t come from annual exposure: it needs to be woven into the life of the place throughout the year. Have I got that completely cracked myself? Certainly not. But I’m equally certain that it won’t be fixed on 2 March.
The children will see through our gimmicks. They’re no more likely to develop a love of reading because they dressed up as Harry Potter on World Book Day than they are to develop a love of cabbages because of the events of National Cabbage Day.
Now, if you served up cabbage in delicious dishes all year round, then you might be on to something.
Michael Tidd is deputy head at Edgewood Primary School in Nottinghamshire
