The school-fair booking form

The booking form came from the school office in the second week of September, one page on a PTA template, with the fair poster still pinned above the desk and the caretaker's keys on a nail by the door. Under the fee box someone had added three words in biro: insurance, DBS, risk assessment. When I went back to collect the key to the gym, the fair coordinator held the form against the door frame and asked the question plainly: what should a performer be able to show before we let him put a table on the field?

It is a fair question, and it deserves better than a laugh and a wave at the valise. This note sets down what the published record asks for, what each paper covers, and where the paper stops.

What the form is actually asking

The booking form is the first document in the chain, and it is a modest one: name of the act, times, the space requested, power needs, the fee, and the box that says documents must be provided before the event. The school is not being awkward. If a child is hurt on the field, the paperwork is what the school, its insurers and, in the worst case, a court will reach for first. The form exists so that nobody has to remember anything on the day, which is the same reason a performer writes a running order before a show. Both documents assume the day will be loud, crowded, and the wrong moment to be sorting out what should already be sitting in the folder.

The certificate the fair asks to see

Every fair form I have signed wants public liability insurance, and the figure quoted is most often five million pounds, sometimes ten. The certificate itself is dull, and that is the point: it names the policyholder, the level of cover, and the dates. Equity, the performers' union, arranges cover for members, and most working entertainers I have shared a green room with carry either that or a policy from a specialist insurer. The detail worth checking is the expiry date, printed small, because a fair booked in September and held in June can sit on either side of a renewal. Print the certificate and bring the printed page, not a screenshot on a phone: the person checking acts in at a school gate on a Saturday morning is a volunteer with a clipboard and a queue behind you.

What counts as a risk assessment?

The Health and Safety Executive publishes a short leaflet on five steps: identify the hazards, decide who might be harmed, evaluate the risks, record what you do about them, review. That is all the document is, and for a children's entertainer it fits on one side of A4. The hazards are the honest ones from the act. An uninflated 260Q balloon is a choking hazard for the under-threes, so the modelling happens with the youngest at the back of the crowd, next to their adults. The unicycle's 20-inch wheel brings a performer at speed to a child's head height, so the act has a rope line and a spotter. Stilts put the walker's eye line past seven feet, so the door of the hired hall is checked for overhead clearance before the show, not during it. None of this is invented; it is the working list, written down where a committee can read it.

What does the DBS check actually cover?

The DBS box causes more confusion than the rest of the form combined, and the honest answer sits on gov.uk. A Disclosure and Barring Service check is requested by an employer or an organisation, not bought by an individual for their own use: a self-employed performer can apply for a basic check in their own name, which shows unspent convictions and nothing more. The enhanced checks schools ask about belong to regulated activity, and the published definition turns on frequency and responsibility, the teaching and supervising that happens week after week. A performer paid for one afternoon on a school field generally sits outside it. Many schools ask anyway, and offering a basic check with photo ID is a reasonable answer. The note in the margin should say what the check covers, and just as plainly, what it does not.

The pitch and its terms

A PTA fair on the school's own field is a private event, but move the same table onto a high street or a council-owned green and the paperwork grows a branch: a pitch licence or trading consent, a fee, and the council's event safety sheet, which every authority publishes in its own version. The sheets I have read ask for the same family of things: proof of insurance, a site plan, cable ramps where a generator crosses a walkway, weights rather than pegs on hard standing, a stated wind limit for gazebos. The Punch and Judy professors of the seaside tradition worked under much the same terms long before the forms looked like this, paying for a pitch and keeping to the seafront rules. The licence is old news wearing a lanyard.

The folder in the valise

Practically, all of this resolves into a folder that lives in the valise with the pump and the rope: the printed insurance certificate, the one-page risk assessment, the basic check if it was asked for, a copy of the signed booking form, and the fair's site plan with the pitch marked. The folder takes five minutes to assemble after each renewal, and an hour to reconstruct on the morning of a church fete if it never was. In my experience the room rarely asks to see past the certificate's front page, and that is fine. The folder is not there to be read in full. It is there to be produced, at a gate, in the rain, by a volunteer who has been told to look for it.

Where the file goes quiet

Here is what the record does not say. No document in the folder says whether a performer can hold a room of eight-year-olds for forty minutes in a school gym, or read a village-hall crowd that has decided it is time for the raffle. The guidance covers the field, the cable and the wind limit, and it stops at the edge of the crowd. The insurance certificate will not twist a balloon dog, and the DBS check says nothing about whether the running order survives a downpour that pushes two hundred people into a hall booked for eighty. The paperwork is a floor, not the act. The record confirms that a performer is safe to book; it stays silent on whether he is worth watching, which is the question the PTA actually wanted to ask and could not put in biro.

Before your next fair

Read one council's event safety sheet end to end: they are public, they are free, and fifteen minutes with one tells you more than any rumour in a green room. Better still, ask a hall committee if you can see the risk assessment from last year's fete, and compare what the page predicted with what the day produced. Or simply stand at the back of the crowd at the next school fair and watch which table the children stay at. The paperwork decides who gets onto the field. The children decide everything after that.