PTAextra Magazine Summer 2024 | Page 52

Supporting your school in the making due to Covid , but it brought the community and school together . Everyone had a great time . It might not have made money , but it was still a success because everyone enjoyed it .
“ It might not have made money , but it was still a success because everyone enjoyed it .”
How do you decide what to spend your funds on ?
This happens at our AGM . We also ask our principal at the beginning of the year if there ' s anything she needs for the school , or if she has any ideas . What do you regularly spend your funds on ?
Every child in our school gets a new water bottle at the start of the year to encourage them to drink more . And we support the artefact boxes – one of our SLTs [ Senior Leadership Team ] used them at a previous school . They ’ re linked to whatever the children are learning at the time . The children can pick up and touch a lot of the things inside , which really helps them to get a more in-depth understanding of that topic . We ’ ve had really good feedback from the classes , so we set aside some of our budget for that every year .
We also support an enterprise day . Each class decides on something to make and we give them around £ 20 to buy materials . The school then holds a fair to sell whatever has been made , and each child brings in £ 3 or £ 4 to buy something from the other class stalls . Each class will make a profit and can use the money to buy resources for their class . The children really enjoy that one . It teaches them about business and gives them a real sense of achievement .
Finally , our Year Six goes away on a residential every year , so we provide the food for the trip , just to help bring the costs down .
What big projects have you helped to fund ?
A lot of our fundraising for the last four years has gone to improve our outside facilities because we go out in all weather at our school !
The children have a lot of play equipment , but it wasn ' t very accessible , so we bought a container . We funded the work to build the base and had a flatpack container go up . That ' s in use every single day . We ' ve called it Colin ! The children open up Colin , get what they want and put it away at the end of lunchtime . It means the children don ’ t have to ask the staff , it ' s all right there on the playground . We recently bought a sun sail , which went up over the six-week holiday . That ' s in one of our playground grass areas . If it ' s hot and the children want to sit down and have some shade this summer , they can rest on the massive bean bags outside .
Our two biggest projects were probably our trim trail , which we contributed £ 10,000 towards , and our outdoor classroom .
“ A lot of our fundraising for the last four years has gone to improve our outside facilities because we go out in all weather at our school !”
PARENTKIND
. ORG SUMMER 2024 27