Every year, without fail, I look forward to the mummy lesson.
The costume chest comes out, a fish gets wrapped head-to-tail in linen bandages, and a few of my colleagues are gently press-ganged into helping with the canopic jars. I picked the lesson up during my years teaching at Modern English School in Cairo, and it has followed me ever since. The children love it. They talk about it for weeks. They go home and tell their parents, in graphic detail, exactly how the brain was removed through the nose.
It is, in every sense, a fish. And by about day three, it absolutely stinks.
But here's the thing parents sometimes miss when they hear about a lesson like that. The mummy lesson only works because of everything that comes before it. The reading fluency that lets a child access a non-fiction text about Ancient Egypt. The vocabulary built up over weeks. The historical knowledge already in place from earlier units. The handwriting practice that means they can record what they've learned. Without all of that, the mummy lesson is just a memorable afternoon. With it, the lesson becomes the moment a child's learning clicks into place.
At Victory Heights Primary School, we talk about this as Fish and Chips and Bread and Butter. Around 80% of our teaching is bread and butter, the foundational, repeated, knowledge-building work that does the real heavy lifting. The other 20% is fish and chips, the immersive, sensory, awe-and-wonder lessons that children remember for life. The ratio is deliberate, and getting it right is one of the things I care most about as Director of Academics.
What the bread and butter looks like
Bread and butter is the quiet work. It rarely makes it into the photos we share with parents, but it is where the most important learning happens.
It is daily phonics, taught explicitly and systematically, until reading becomes automatic. It is times tables practised until they are instant, not because we love drills, but because a child who has to think hard about 7 × 8 has no working memory left over to solve the actual maths problem. It is retrieval practice at the start of every lesson, where children recall what they learned last week, last term, last year, so that knowledge moves from short-term to long-term memory. It is sentence-level grammar, handwriting, spelling rules, reading aloud, vocabulary instruction, and the careful sequencing of a curriculum so that every new idea sits on top of something already secure.
It is, frankly, not glamorous. But it is the difference between a child who has had a lovely time at primary school and a child who is genuinely ready for everything that comes next.
What the fish and chips looks like
Fish and chips is the lesson the children tell their parents about in the car on the way home.
It is the mummy lesson, slightly pungent fish and all. It is the morning I was kidnapped by a dinosaur at our sister school in Sports City last year, an unexpected start to the day that turned into a brilliant week of forensic science as the children worked out who had taken me and how. It is Dragon Week, with a real Dragon's Lair built inside the school, inspired by Tom Fletcher's There's a Dragon in Your Book, and a TeachRex assembly that genuinely had children believing in dragons by Friday. It is the week we quietly sent Mr Rob to space about an ESA rocket, so that the children could track his mission, decode his messages, and learn what astronauts actually do. The rumour that he was simply having a week off was, I can confirm, entirely unfounded.
These lessons matter not because they are fun, although they are, but because they create emotional memory. The brain holds on to feelings far more reliably than facts, which is why a child can forget a list of dates in a week but remember a costume, a smell, a moment of laughter for a lifetime. When we anchor knowledge to experience, that knowledge stays.
Fish and chips lessons are also where children discover that school is a place where interesting things happen. Where curiosity is taken seriously. Where their teachers love what they teach. That matters too.
Why the ratio matters
The mistake schools make is at both ends of the spectrum.
A school that runs 100% bread and butter produces competent learners who have never quite worked out why any of it was worth doing. A school that runs heavy on fish and chips produces children who have had a wonderful five years but cannot read fluently, write at length, or recall their times tables. Neither serves a child well.
Eighty-twenty is the ratio we have settled on because it gets the proportions right. Knowledge first, built carefully and deliberately, lesson by lesson, week by week. And then, sitting on top of that knowledge, the moments of awe and wonder that make it all worth it.
A child cannot truly marvel at the engineering of a pyramid until they have the historical knowledge to appreciate what they are looking at. They cannot fall in love with a Shakespeare scene until they have the language to understand it. Awe and wonder without knowledge is just spectacle. Knowledge without awe and wonder is just information. Great primary education is both.
What this means for your child
If you walk through VHPS on a normal Tuesday morning, most of what you see will be bread and butter. Children sitting at desks, writing in books, reading aloud, working through maths problems, practising spellings, answering retrieval questions. It will look, and I say this with affection, slightly boring. That is exactly what it should look like.
But every few weeks, you'll get the photo. The costume. The mummified fish. The dragon's lair. The story your child tells you over dinner that you'll be hearing about for months. Those are the fish and chips moments, and they are the payoff, not the point, of everything quieter that came before.
When parents ask me what makes a great primary school, this is what I tell them. Not the gloss. Not the wow lessons. Not the Instagram-friendly moments. Look for the bread and butter. The fish and chips will take care of itself.
And every year, when the costume chest comes out and another reluctant colleague gets recruited to hold a canopic jar, I'll be reminded why I love this job. The children will remember the dragons and the dinosaurs and the mummified fish forever. But it is the quiet, careful, foundational teaching the week before, and the week after, that I am most proud of.