Pandemonium at School

Pandemonium at School is Jeremy Strong at his daftest, a school comedy for 8 year olds about a supply teacher who gets through the entire timetable by half past nine.

What happens

Dullandon Primary runs on a timetable that Mr Shrapnell, the headmaster, spent months perfecting. He runs the school like his own private army and blows a whistle in the playground with one eye on his watch.

Then Mr David goes sleepwalking, falls downstairs and breaks his arm and two ribs. Mr Shrapnell is not sympathetic. He says he doesn't care if the man has been sawn in half, stuffed with green peppers and eaten by cannibals, as long as he turns up at ten to nine and teaches his class.

Poor Mrs Bunt the secretary has to find a replacement. Nobody will come. One supply teacher tells her that Mr Shrapnell can go and boil his head.

That leaves the last name on the list. Miss Pandemonium says yes before Mrs Bunt can finish the sentence, gets the name of the school wrong, and falls over while pulling on her tights.

She arrives in an ambulance. She bought it at a car auction and everything still works, siren and lights included. She gets out with six bags, hair like a rook's nest and her eyeshadow mostly on her nose.

Your reader will be completely on her side by page ten.

The best scene comes straight after. Told that Maths is first on the timetable, she asks one child what two add two is, gives another a sum so enormous that nobody could do it in their head, admits she can't do it either, and declares Maths finished. English is spelling "cat". History is somebody's birthday. By half nine the whole day is done and the class have no idea what has hit them.

After that it's helicopters built in the classroom, a Friendship Cake with rather too much friendliness in it, and the headmaster somehow talked into rowing across the school pool in a tin tub with a hole in it.

One thing you might want to mention. Mr Shrapnell shouts at his secretary and sneers at a colleague with broken ribs, and it's all played for laughs. That's the joke of the book, the awful grown-up who thinks a timetable matters more than children, and most readers will enjoy watching him lose. A child who is genuinely anxious about a strict teacher might just need a word about it being a joke.

What to read next

Fancy another classroom where the new teacher turns everything upside down? In Cartoon Kid, Casper falls off his chair on the first day and then discovers that Mr Butternut thinks every child in the room is secretly a superhero.