Head Kid

David Baddiel's Head Kid is a very silly school story for 7 year olds about the naughtiest boy in the school waking up as the head teacher.

What happens

Bracket Wood has never had a good inspection report. Not once since it opened in 1983. There was one brief spell in the nineties when it got Satisfactory, and then it turned out the inspector had ticked the wrong box.

Now the inspectors are coming back. If Bracket Wood gets another Inadequate, the council might shut the place down.

Which brings us to the school's other problem. Ryan Ward.

Ryan is a prankster with standards. No buckets balanced on doors, thank you. His motto is to make it new, and he gets every detail right. You meet him doing mirror writing on a sleeping teacher's hand while a documentary called How Buckets Are Made plays in the background.

His best friend Dionna is his prank assistant, and she does not consider herself junior to him. She's two months older, for a start. She's also the reason the ant in Ryan's plastic box survives the chapter. Little ant just strolling round the garden, building its ant stuff. Not fair on the ant.

Then the head teacher gives up and walks out. His replacement, Mr Carter, frightens the staff every bit as much as he frightens the children.

And then Ryan and Mr Carter swap bodies.

So the worst-behaved child in the building is now running it, and a terrifying head teacher is a pupil whose sworn enemy is in charge of him.

The real fun is the voice. There's a narrator who keeps interrupting to be annoyed about things. He goes off on one about the phrase "as if butter wouldn't melt in his mouth", pointing out that if butter genuinely wouldn't melt in your mouth then you should call either a doctor or an appliance engineer. Your reader will read those bits out to you. Be ready.

It's rude in exactly the way seven year olds like best. There's a bogey used as ant bait in the first few pages.

One thing about the humour. It has a bit of bite. Teachers get properly mocked, one boy's academic prospects are written off in half a sentence, and the long joke about school inspection ratings will sail over most young heads. None of it is cruel. But if yours is the sort of child who tries out whatever they've just read the very next morning, you may be hearing from the school about an ant.

What to read next

Baddiel pulls the same trick again in The Parent Agency, where a boy says three times that he wishes he had better parents and ends up somewhere children get to pick.