Nothing to do in the Easter holidays? Why not go back to school for a fortnight and polish up your skills in BMX-ing or perhaps advanced text messaging?
The BBC is trawling Britain for 15 teachers game enough to appear in a new children’s prime-time programme Rule The School where roles are reversed. They are also seeking six children, aged 11 to 14, who are whizzes in their specialist subjects, such as S Club 7 dancing or computer games.
Filmed in a boarding school while its normal occupants are home for the holidays, the documentary will follow the 15 “pupils” in class, assembly, at playtime and struggling with their homework. The six juvenile teachers will also make home videos of themselves talking about their charges’ progress and behaviour that day.
An ad in The TES elicited more than 200 replies in just 10 days from eager teachers dying to have a go. A poster campaign launched in every secondary school in Britain earlier this week is likely to attract hundreds or thousands more.
The programme’s producer, Gail Hendrie at BBC Scotland, said: “We had one email from a 50-year-old ‘vivacious red-head’ RE teacher in Coventry, who is ‘willing to try anything’, another from a 29-year-old ‘big kid’ whose staffroom colleagues don’t get his sense of humour, and a ‘hip chick’ with ‘more va va voom than Viagra and more panache than piles’ who wants ‘to shatter some stereotypes’.
“Some people want to do something different in the school holidays, and some fancy 15 minutes of fame. But we have also had a lot who are quite serious and want to learn more about the sort of things their own students are into to make them better, more aware teachers.
“Only one so far has asked about the pay.”
email ruletheschool@bbc.co.uk or check out www.bbc.co.ukcbbcjoin_inindex.shtml