State schools are becoming fundraising machines fuelled by homemade croquembouche and shabby-chic fairy cakes

There is a guilt that gnaws at me as I drop my children off at school. Sometimes it strikes as I scroll down my WhatsApp groups, past the swarms of parents frantically rallying the troops for the latest school fundraising effort. “Bake a cake!” they cry amid a scatter of earnestly imploring emojis.

Sadly, the nature of my work means that I can rarely do much to help, as I often gig at night and then spend the day writing. While the more domestically organised of my friends are rocking up to the trestle table with a 9ft croquembouche, I have been known to buy fairy cakes from the supermarket and spend 15 minutes duffing them up to look a bit more plausibly homemade.

Funding is no joke at state schools. Drastic cuts in the past few years have meant that, all over the country, PTFAs (Parents, Teachers and Friends Associations) are now desperately scrabbling about for a few quid to splash out on such luxuries as roof tiles and pens. A friend with kids at a local primary school recently told me their PTFA was trying to raise money to employ an art teacher out of their own pockets. That’s an awful lot of shabby-chic fairy cakes.

With our GDP-addled, post-Thatcherite mindset, we’re probably supposed to think, well at least it’s only art that’s being neglected, and not something important like supply chain logistics, but out with the sparkly pens and potato-printing goes many young children’s happiest time of the school week, when they can explore the at-once soothing and thrilling magic of their own creativity. That loss is the blunt reality of underfunding in education, and the reason for my guilt at not doing more to help make up the shortfall.

While I may be no Mary Berry, what I do have is a lot of very kind and professionally funny friends – some of whom are in PTFAs of their own, and many of whom I have career-ending dirt on. And so it was that, through a combination of simple generosity, bartered favours and the odd implied threat, I was recently able to arrange a school comedy night with an improbably starry line-up. The sight of 200 parents sitting on PE benches and howling with laughter, as comics who could have spent their Friday night playing to a stadium gave it everything in the vicinity of a child-sized pommel horse, is one that I’ll treasure forever.

We raised a fair bit of money, and I received disproportionate praise (it’s all I ask) for texting a few friends, while the PTFA volunteers got far less glory for twice doing a mad dash to the offy when the booze ran out. But they were the real heroes of the night, along with the comedians, and I still needed something else to assuage my guilt.

My opportunity came this week when an email fell into my inbox asking if any parents could volunteer to give a talk to the kids for “international day”. My hand shot up. Yes! This was a job I could do. Talking, right? I can talk. I talk for a living, for hours at a time. Sometimes people want to talk back, so I talk directly at them until they stop talking so that I can talk a bit more. However raucous, aggressive or drunk you may be, I will talk at you until you laugh, clap or leave.

My subject was Iran, and I was to speak for 15 minutes to classes of 30 five- and six-year-olds. How hard could it be? I Googled a picture of a big fluffy Persian cat, and away we went. I told them all about carpets, about the snowy peaks of Mount Damavand, and about the ritual of leaping over bonfires at Persian new year.

When I was finished, there were questions. Every little hand went up, and all they wanted to know about was the fire-jumping: “Does it hurt?” and “Do the police catch you?” and “I don’t want to be on fire”. In hindsight, it was a rookie mistake; you can’t tell five- and six-year-olds that you jump over fire without them instantly forgetting everything else you said, and now none of the other children are allowed to play with my daughter because “Vivie’s mum is a pyromaniac”.

Of course, my small contributions to school life are part of a much bigger patchwork, not just here but in every school in the country. For the past few years our politicians have been so caught up in trying to puzzle out what “Brexit means Brexit” means that silly little things like looking after our children have fallen off the news agenda. I long for the day when we can pull ourselves out of this tailspin and go back to arguing about what schools need and how we might be able to provide it.

In the meantime, I want to say to the parents, teachers and friends who are doggy-paddling like mad to keep the education system afloat: you are the village who raise our children, and that is not something that can be measured by reference to economic growth figures. It is measured in your time and loving care, and will be paid back with their happiness. I see you, and I appreciate you. Thank you.