Supporting your school
Stocksfest raised £ 13,000!
We had our backup plan sketched out where everything would go if it rained, and everyone knew about it. We were very organised, but then we crossed our fingers and toes that it wouldn ' t be needed because the whole point of Stocksfest was to take advantage of our huge school site.
Erin:“ Planning took eight or nine months, so we grabbed all the deals we could get during that time.”
We managed to do some negotiations too, like with the local butchers to get discounted burgers, and things like that.
The other thing we did was outsourced a lot of stuff, like the stalls, because that reduced the cost risk for us. We reached out to a lot of businesses we knew in the community. Some of them were parents, like the Indian bubble tea stall we had. We had Stocksfest jewellery made by one of the PTA member ' s sisters who has a jewellery business, and I found a few other businesses on Facebook and Google as well.
Holders paid us a £ 50 pitch fee to be there, which really took the stress off of us. With the food vans, we asked for 10 % of their profit, and a couple of them really cleaned up.
One of the guys gave us close to £ 200. The ice cream guy gave us £ 150, and he was only there for four hours.
Erin:“ We had a Plan B just in case the weather wasn ' t that great, which luckily we didn ' t have to worry about in the end.”
We have this paved area, which we could have used as our field can get quite waterlogged when it ' s rainy. The thinking was, we’ d just move most of the stuff onto the paved area and try to create more shelters with the gazebos we have, and maybe open up a few of the classrooms too.
Ken: I would say our site is the size of at least three football pitches, it’ s massive.
Erin:“ We were thinking about preselling tickets but decided against that.”
We just didn ' t want the hassle of trying to scan people in, so we didn ' t pre-sell. We did charge £ 5 to enter, adults and children, but there was so much stuff to do that we thought it was worth it, and not a single person complained.
To me, it certainly looked worth the £ 5 when you walked into Stocksfest. It was spectacular – we had a 30-player orchestra playing at the entrance and stilt walkers at the front. We created a path that basically had everything running down it, and then we had a whole football pitch dedicated to NERF lasers.
Erin:“ We had lots of PTA members behind the scenes and a lot of the school staff volunteered for the evening part.”
We had 80 volunteers across the school and wider community to make the day possible. For a one form small village school, I think that’ s truly epic. Also Mr Hipkiss, our headteacher, was key to the festival’ s success.
Ken was pretty much split into three because he had the stage to manage and all the bands, and then stuff went wrong with our electrics!
26 PARENTKIND. ORG SUMMER 2025