Hawksfest: the school field becomes a festival

The forecast was awful. The field was damp. Nobody seemed to care. Hawksfest 2026, our first ever mini festival, took over the school grounds on Saturday and turned into one of the best days of the year. By the end of it the community had raised £3,004.25.

Live bands played through the afternoon, every one of them giving their time for free. There were rides, craft stalls, a queue for the burgers, pizza and ice cream doing brisk business, and a Reptile Man drawing exactly the crowd you would expect. Local stallholders set up alongside the school’s own, and families arrived in coats and wellies and stayed far longer than the weather deserved.

The stand-out, though, was Year 6. The children planned, designed and ran their own enterprise stalls across the day, coming up with the ideas themselves and then handling the reality of customers, money and a long shift on their feet. Watching them work out on the fly what was selling and what wasn’t was a proper lesson in enterprise, and they were brilliant at it.

Hawksfest replaced our usual Summer Fun Day this year, and the gamble paid off. It was pulled together by the Friends of Nicholas Hawksmoor School committee and a small army of volunteers, and every penny of that £3,004.25 goes straight back into the school. Mostly, though, it did the thing a good school event should do: it filled the field with people who wanted to be there. Rain and all.