A mini-city is being built in Britain with its own airport, hospital, police station, newspaper and currency. But is KidZania just a chance for kids to have some role-playing fun while their parents shop – or a way for big business to get its claws into them early? Stuart Jeffries reports

‘It’s a game-changer,” says Joel Cadbury, the chocolate heir and former owner of the Groucho Club. This may be something of an understatement. Cadbury is the chairman of KidZania, a £20m mini-city currently being built above the Marks & Spencer in west London’s vast Westfield shopping mall. KidZania will be two-thirds the scale of reality and will consist of a 75,000sq ft role-playing theme park for kids aged four to 14. It will include airport, A&E, police station, sports stadium, theatre, shops, university, bank, sushi and pizza concessions. It will even have its own newspaper, passports and currency. Most strikingly, it will also feature a sort of holding pen for parents.

It’s certainly a game-changer for children’s entertainment, but it may also be one for education. Instead of tranquilising kids with video games, or suckering them with rollercoasters in the traditional theme-park manner, KidZania will recreate workplaces such as operating theatres, plane cockpits, radio stations and banks. Children will play at working and will be paid in “KidZos” – above, you would hope, the minimum wage. There are more than 60 roles to choose from, each taking about 25 minutes. Your child could be a refuse collector in the morning, pizza chef over lunch, and surgeon in the afternoon. “Get ready for a better world,” is KidZania’s slogan. In the park, everything works: slacker kids, like broken lightbulbs, are programmatically unacceptable.

Facebook Twitter Pinterest Japanese children play at being dentists Photograph: Kiyoshi Ota/Getty Images

So the architecture of KidZania isn’t just a simulation of the real world. It’s a preparation for it. Cadbury, who has a touch of the Willy Wonka about him, explains why. Children can learn to fly a BA aeroplane, deliver letters dressed as little DHL drivers and make Innocent smoothies. At the Renault engineering centre, they can learn how to change tyres; at H&M’s academy, they will be taught the rudiments of fashion and design; and at the Dorsett Hotel, they can be managers, front-desk staff or housekeepers. Your child could even become an oompa loompa – sorry, an expert chocolatier – at the Cadbury factory.

The promotional material shows a child in a pretend KidZania surgery, apparently anaesthetising a dog on an operating table. (That’s got to be a contravention of something, surely, unless the dog’s stuffed.)

“We’re opening children’s eyes to the realities of life,” says Cadbury, who talks glowingly of all the “industry partners” who are being wooed to lend their brands. But why do you need them? “If you have a bank called The Bank, it’s not very authentic,” he says. “You need the real names to authenticate the content.” While KidZania has lots of partners worldwide (including McDonald’s, Waitrose, Epson, Sony, DHL, Walmart, Olay and Mitsubishi), its London outpost has yet to firm up a banking partner. Perhaps a failed one like RBS would be the perfect way to teach kids about banking in the real world. But that probably won’t happen.

The most intriguing KidZania simulation involves a pretend burning building. Paramedics will pull a child casualty from a fake blaze, check for a pulse, then stretcher them to a child-sized ambulance that will ferry them to A&E, where little nurses will administer pretend treatment. Meanwhile, child firefighters will put out the blaze, child cops will investigate the incident, and cub reporters from the radio station and the newspaper will go Paxo on those responsible.

Facebook Twitter Pinterest Junior Japanese firefighters. Photograph: Kiyoshi Ota/Getty Images

“The inspiration for KidZania is what children do every day,” says Xavier López Ancona, the creator of KidZania, who is taking me on a tour of the thing that has made him very rich. “Little girls pretend to be mothers or boys simulate driving cars.” When the 50-year-old man described as “the Mexican Walt Disney” was working at General Electric in the 1990s, an old schoolfriend approached him with an idea to launch nurseries focusing on role-playing. That morphed into KidZania and the first park opened in Santa Fe in 1999. Today, 35 million children have visited a KidZania in cities as diverse as Mumbai, Tokyo, Cairo, Istanbul, Lisbon and Seoul. Nine more, including the London one, are in the offing. KidZania hasn’t yet broken into the US, but López hopes to soon.

The KidZania parks all have a similar formula. First, parents pay for admission. “The most expensive ticket will be £28,” says Cadbury, “so it’s cheaper than childcare.” Children are then fitted with radio-frequency tags so their whereabouts can be monitored for the four-hour experience. They are then separated from their parents, who can watch from what’s called the Parents’ Clubhouse; or – as is more likely, given that almost all KidZanias have been cunningly built next to malls – go shopping.

How refreshing, I say, that in the age of helicopter parenting, children are being separated from cosseting, overbearing adults. “That’s essential,” says Ollie Vigors, Cadbury’s longtime business partner. “The kids are empowered to make their own decisions. Parents are an impediment. I know, as a parent, that I say ‘Don’t do that’ to my children a ridiculous number of times a day. If parents are taken out of the equation, it actually gives children the freedom to play and learn.” The only roles for parents are as spectators: they can watch a play or a football match, or sit in an aeroplane being told by pint-sized cabin crew what to do in case of an emergency, but nothing more. In London, this will be flight BA 2311 (actually the fuselage of a British Airways Airbus that’s already been winched into place).

Facebook Twitter Pinterest A Japanese child makes a hamburger Photograph: Kiyoshi Ota/Getty Images

Kids will be welcomed to KidZania with a cheque and the greeting from adult staff: “Have a productive day!” They can cash their cheque at the bank and spend their kidzos on food, go-karting or gifts. They can then earn more by working at different jobs. The children who graduate from the university will earn more. “Just like in the real world,” says López. They can also open a bank account, deposit their cheque, and be issued with a debit card for use at KidZania cash machines. Japanese kids, says López, save more KidZos than their Mexican or Indonesian counterparts. British kids would probably rack up massive debts, I suggest. López laughs: in the happy land of KidZania, debt does not exist. Pity. If it did, kids could train as loan company flunkies, or take turns playing Carol Vorderman in debt-consolidation adverts.

Dr Richard Barry, KidZania’s head of education, is keen to stress that the emphasis is on learning through doing: “I believe Einstein hit the proverbial nail on the head when he said, ‘Learning is experience. Everything else is just information.’ I think the experience is a tin opener for further learning.” Barry and the team have been planning KidZania activities with an eye on the national curriculum and the Early Years Foundation Stage. Have any schools or teachers, I wonder, been put off by KidZania’s capitalist ethos, its consumerism and its echoes of child labour? Not so far, Barry replies. He doesn’t think that will be an issue. “We’re expecting lots of school trips and lots of teachers as well as children to find this inspirational.”

Facebook Twitter Pinterest An aeroplane being installed at the London KidZania. Photograph: Matthew Lloyd

But for some, there is a problem. When I tell a fellow parent about KidZania, she emails: “This seems like total capitalist nightmare abomination, and I wouldn’t want my child involved.” Certainly, parts of the press pack do not seem to be directed at parents. I felt queasy at the description of KidZania as a “new and innovative way to build your brand”. So it offers a means, funded by parents, for businesses to sink their claws into what the blurb calls “customers of the future”. Children: not so much little dudes as money-making opportunities.

Still, it seems a safe bet that, come next year, this building site in west London will be teeming with children. Cadbury and Vigors expect up to one million children each year, and are already planning to expand their franchise to east London, as well as to Birmingham or Manchester. As a result, millions of British children may be readied for the world of work – and perhaps inculcated with a revulsion for benefit dependency – at Britain’s most ideologically explicit theme park.

As I leave, I can’t help thinking that KidZania is what you’d get if work and pensions secretary Iain Duncan Smith was put in charge of Alton Towers. Goodbye white-knuckle ride. Hello nice sensible career-nurturing fun.