Supporting your school
Spending wisely
“ We figured we needed £ 20,000 to £ 25,000, so we made a three-year plan to try and achieve that”
Kelly Rotheram, Chair of St Julian ' s School PTA, spoke to us about her committee’ s project to replace their school’ s unsafe adventure playground with an exciting new outdoor space
Tell us a bit about your PTA and school...
I only started last September as Chair. We had a complete change of our committee – all three members from the last five years stepped down.
We ' re quite a small village school, but we take a lot of children from surrounding villages, so it has quite a large catchment area. We don ' t have a lot of space. We ' ve got four classrooms and a playground, and we had a really old adventure playground that we decided to replace.
Why did you want to replace the adventure playground?
It was very old and wasn ' t safe for the children, so the school stopped using it for about two years. It had been there for over ten years and had begun to degrade.
One of the teachers at the school, Mrs Parker, stepped forward to manage the project of getting a new adventure playground. She came to the PTA and said,“ We ' ve got this massive project that we’ re going to need a lot of fundraising for, can the committee help form a strategy?”
Our PTA raises between £ 5,000 to £ 6,000 a year, but that goes on a lot of other projects, like school trips, the buses for the school trips, treats for the children throughout the year and so on. In total we figured we needed £ 20,000 to £ 25,000, so we made a three-year plan to try and achieve that.
28 PARENTKIND. ORG SUMMER 2025