A short spot by the BBC.

Rebecca Jordan – The Saturday Guardian

Glastonbury weekend inspires the type of creativity that can also enrich our working lives

Last weekend we made our first foray into the hitherto sneered-at world of festivals en famille. My previous trips to Glastonbury were not a success. The trauma of sleeping in a tent and not having anywhere clean to take out my contact lenses or plug in my hair straighteners was too much for me. And turning to booze to make the experience more palatable wasn’t, with hindsight, too helpful. If there’s one thing worse than waking up in a tent, it’s waking up in a tent with a hangover. Or a stranger, I suppose. Or perhaps a hangover and stranger playing the bongos …

After an inauspicious start to the weekend, involving an eight-hour journey, four small children, a car that did Torville and Dean figure-of-eights in the mud and pitching a tent in the dark, it all turned out to be rather lovely. We awoke in the morning to the sound of birds singing, a glimpse of sunshine and the infamous festival loos. The kids insisted that the toilets smelled like “dinner ladies’ tuna”, which would make interesting feedback for Jamie Oliver.

Far too paranoid and uptight about the kids to indulge in any typical festival hedonism, I resigned myself to not getting hideously drunk, lost and spending the night waving my arms around in front of a burger van playing obscure techno. Instead I spent the weekend in the “Kidz” field, lying around on the grass in the sun as my daughters watched “theatre” (well, Bodger and Badger), had their faces painted, clambered over elaborately themed play areas, rode on ecofriendly hand-cranked fairground rides and learned circus skills.

It dawned on me that the reason Glastonbury is so successful as an event, and has become such an institution, is that rather than being another booze-fuelled festival, it has always been more about creating a safe area for people to escape to and play in. Whether it’s through music, theatre, dancing, or dressing-up or experimenting with lifestyle choices, it is a place where you really can escape. Glastonbury is an opportunity to put aside our day-to-day responsibilities and to get back to the spirit of play. It is a purely creative, interactive experience which can only enrich our daily working lives.

Work and play are seen as opposites. We are either at work, or we are enjoying our leisure time. In a world where even our leisure time is strictly allocated and then utilised as a way of getting cash out of us, we might watch TV, listen to music, play on the computer, play a bit of sport or go for a walk.

What about creativity? What about challenging yourself to find out something new about your own abilities? What about communicating and sharing with other people? Too often we put so much energy into our work we don’t have the energy to make the most of playtime. But used more creatively, our leisure time can enrich our work.

Without knowing how to tell a story, I don’t think people can write reports or essays. Without understanding something about characterisation, acting and role play you won’t get far in board meetings and presentations. Without a bit of rough and tumble, you’ll always be afraid to interact confidently and physically in other people’s personal spaces. Most importantly, without some proper playtime, you may take yourself too seriously.

Glastonbury doesn’t have to be the only place we should feel free to play. Tell stories, write, draw, paint, run around the garden in a homemade dragon costume as if it’s the Green Fields and it’s 1992. At least you’ll go to work with a smile on your face on Monday morning, even if you’ve learned nothing else.

· Rebecca Jordan is a co-director and co-founder of pdceducation.co.uk

Abigail Flanagan, The Guardian

Glastonbury is arguably the foremost music festival in the world but a big part of its success is down to the fact that there is so much more to Worthy Farm’s extravaganza than just music. Europe’s biggest open-air event is also home to Britain’s largest free children’s festival – Kidz Field – and all children aged 12 and under are admitted to Glastonbury free provided they are accompanied by a ticketholding adult.

Like something Willy Wonka might have dreamed up, this year’s Kidz Field offers up 1.2 hectares of fantastic free entertainment, education and fun for the family. The big top will feature a vast array of theatrical mayhem, ranging from Bodger & Badger to crime-fighting super heroines; peerless puppeteer Prof Panic and, of course, more clowns than you can chuck a pie at. At the Syra circus big top, kids can try all manner of circus-skills workshops, from unicycling to trapeze, and there will be tales aplenty in the story telling marquee. There will also be all manner of arts and crafts workshops plus Facepak’s fantastic face-painting and funky makeovers by the Bindi Crew.

Outside the tents, there are numerous rides and games along with a giant, enchanted climbing castle. Weird and wonderful characters will be out and about and adding to the magic but if it all gets a bit much for younger ones, you can decamp to the safe, staffed Little Kidz area, which has everything from soft play to a karaoke stage and a pirate ship. The fun extends way beyond the Kidz Field. The green fields have their own kids area with children’s performance marquee; countless arts and crafts activities; a daily programme of theatre, clowning, puppetry and circus shows; skateboard ramp and a superb rainbow warrior climbing frame. The TP field will have loads going on for kids too; likewise, the theatre and circus fields are a must. There are still tickets available for this year’s festival, which starts on June 27. So if you are looking for something truly out of the ordinary to do next weekend then dig the tent out of the shed, grab the kids and head to Pilton. Imagine how they will feel waking up each morning to find that they really have run away and joined one enormous circus.

Lloyd Shepherd, The Guardian, 27-06-04

There are two ways you know you’ve entered the Kidz Field. First, a smiling woman in a yellow security vest says “Smile … now!” as you go under the arch into the field. Secondly, there is a sudden outbreak of men of a certain age lying sleeping in the sun, or surreptitiously reading the newspaper.

Any dad will tell you that sleeping men of a certain age, or men reading newspapers in huddled groups, is a sure sign of kids securely at play somewhere nearby. This is the normal behaviour of the exhausted male when his offspring are being entertained by someone else – a chance to catch up on sleep, or the news. While the mothers watch their fledglings indulgently, the men wallow in temporary escape. They could just as easily have called it Dadz Field.

Just past the entrance to the Kidz Field there is a gigantic wall on which kids can paint, under the supervision of someone called “Hugh Jart” (geddit?), and leave messages like “Jack thought Kings of Leon were great” (which is odd, because I don’t think anyone else did), “Black Eyed Peas Rool” and the rather un-Glastonbury “paint over this and you’re dead”. Once inside the fields, there are a range of activities, including the Animal Train, a “percussive sculpture” which looks like a Dr Seuss vision and which a bunch of kids were banging away on merrily; hopefully, they will show the same impulse the next time they see a Tracey Emin. There is a circus tent offering shows like Dude, Where’s My Teddy Bear, Puck’s Bottom, and Foolhardy Folk, who sound like druids but are in fact “masters of slapstick.” There’s a story-telling tent, and a DJ playing Johnny Cash standing on a trolley painted in ladybird colours.

The overwhelming vibe is middle-class urban. For every hippy parent with locks and tattoos, there are half a dozen sensibly dressed women sitting on sensible picnic rugs with sensible coolboxes. These are women who think that the Kidz Field’s baby yoga must have some merit, and who presumably met their spouses while finding themselves in India. And just as with every ‘country fayre’ in a London park, there is an enormous queue for the facepainting. If you’re not a parent, you won’t understand the fear that a queue for facepainting normally engenders, but the Glastonbury magic had worked its effect. The kids in the queue actually looked like they were willing to wait their turn.

The most impressive thing in the Kidz Field is the crafts tent. This was absolutely crammed with kids making things, drawing things, painting things and modelling things. I don’t know, and forgot to ask, what the qualifications of the people doing these things with the kids were, but the general description ‘miracle worker’ might be appropriate. Call it the Glastonbury vibe, call it the ley lines, call it whatever you want – but for that many kids to be occupied in a meaningful way, something magical must have happened. It certainly wasn’t the national curriculum.

We left the Kidz Field feeling spiritually refreshed. The dads still slumbered quietly, the mums put things in and took things out of picnic boxes, the children played merrily. Outside, the Valkyries were riding out of the Pyramid stage, presumably on their way to get their faces painted.