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In the March edition of Headteacher Update, Tom Donohoe described his school’s attempt to raise money for a new music, dance and drama room. Here, he tells us what they did next and talks us through the highs and lows of seeing the project through to the end


that he had shared with an excited staffroom just before he left. Unfortunately, I did not inherit the £150,000 needed to build the project. It was left to me to explain the costs of the project and the fact that we were unlikely to achieve this build within the next few years, as we were a bit short of the amount needed – about £150,000 short to be precise. At this time, the school was categorised by the local authority as “in


E


need of improvement”, so I had other priorities to keep me occupied in those early years. I did, however, keep those plans in the back of my mind and having had a successful Ofsted inspection in 2009, we decided that the time was right to try to make the dream a reality. At the first staff meeting of the academic year in September 2009, I explained to the staff the aim and talked them through the journey we were going to have to follow in order to achieve the desired outcome. At this point we still had no funding to put towards the build, but we told


ight years ago, I was appointed as headteacher at Anton Junior School in Andover, Hampshire. I inherited thrilling plans from the previous head to build a music, dance and drama room


staff that the leadership team were prepared to make it a major focus and put in the time to raise the required revenue through a mixture of grant finding and fundraising events. I was delighted with the staff’s reaction – they shared our excitement and we had 100 per cent buy-in. We shared with them our initial plans for fundraising and they then came up with some additional ideas, meaning we quite quickly accumulated a really good list. Once we had the staff on board, the next step was to get the support of


the whole school community. At the start of each academic year we have a meeting for parents in each of our four year groups where we outline expectations, highlight key events, and provide information about the residential trip. At the end of each of these meetings we shared our vision for our fundraising year and asked for parents’ support. We distributed a simple questionnaire that collated information about any useful contacts that parents might have. This proved a very useful exercise and we felt we had gathered the support of parents right from the outset. Obviously we wanted the governors behind the project too and they


were very excited and supportive when we shared the idea with them. The buildings and grounds committee was particularly keen to get involved and the finance group was delighted when I reassured them that we were not intending to use any money from the school budget. It is fair to say that one or two governors were pretty sceptical. They


did not believe it was possible, in the current economic climate, to raise that sort of money, but this merely made us more determined.


“The finance group was delighted when I reassured them that we were not


intending to use any money from the school budget.”


Equally sceptical was the local authority. We are very fortunate to have


a super relationship with Bowie Heer, our excellent Hampshire County Council (HCC) property services representative, but even he thought we were a little mad. I remember talking to him about the project in late September 2009 and because we had no funds at all he did not really take it too seriously. To his credit, as our fundraising year picked up momentum he became a central figure in the success of the project. One thing he did make clear at an early stage was that the local authority take a fairly “old school” view on the sort of pre-engineered wooden structured buildings that we were considering. Perhaps I should have taken this point on board, but for some reason I chose not to. I left the initial meeting with Mr Heer telling him that I would keep him informed of our fundraising progress and he promised to investigate companies building wooden constructions that had the approval of HCC. True to his word, later in the autumn term Mr Heer came back to


Heavy lifting: The crane proved the most exciting part of the build for the children. The architect’s plans for the project (above)


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us with the name of a HCC-approved company that specialises in constructing wooden buildings for schools. We were excited at this and wasted no time in finding a building that they had recently built


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