Two schools run campaigns to upgrade their classrooms
‘We’ve raised more than £1,000 to enhance our beekeeping work’
Ashbrow School serves a richly diverse community on the outskirts of Huddersfield, West Yorkshire, and provides many outdoor learning opportunities to complement the primary school curriculum. One of these is beekeeping: we have an apiary of 12 colonies housing our school honeybees, and an outdoor chalet-style classroom where we store our bee equipment, and where our children change into their bee suits in preparation for bee inspections. The classroom is also used to carry out ‘hands-on’ lessons such as microscopy, bee breeding and practical hive building. As a Forest School, we are
committed to providing an outdoor environment that cares for all our wildlife and pollinators. The joy that beekeeping brings to our children is heart-warming, but after 15 years the sloping roof of our chalet is rotting and needs repairing. The felt is falling down, and we have to use buckets under the leaks when it rains!
6 AUTUMN 2022 FundEd With school budgets so tight, we
decided to launch a long-term fundraising campaign to install a new green roof that will add interest to our school, as well as supporting bees and other pollinators. We are also keen to install a power supply to provide lighting and heating. Our apiary is used by local beekeeping associations, and we are a British Beekeepers Association (BBKA) ‘beacon school’, so can offer support and advice to other schools. We’d like to host more schools in the future, so that children can come along and try their hand at beekeeping. To cover the costs of the chalet
improvements, we aim to raise £10,000 over the next year with a campaign that grows from the grassroots up. We’ve launched a crowdfunding page on the InvestMyCommunity platform and the BBKA is helping spread the word to its members. I’ve also taken a display of our schoolwork and a collection bucket to the BBKA Spring Convention.
Our two-form entry primary has
four school drivers: communication, respect, ambition and enterprise, so we’ve incorporated entrepreneurship into our fundraising efforts. The sale of our honey and beeswax candles is adding to our tally and the children are now focused on making gift packs and products we can sell at parents’ evenings and end-of-term celebrations. These range from beeswax soaps, lip balms and hand creams to tomato plants and seeds from our garden, wooden toys made in bushcraft lessons and our award- winning honey sweets. We’re also raising small bee
colonies to sell to schools in Sheffield, supported by grants from the David & Jane Richards Family Foundation, a charity which supports beekeeping. So far, we’ve raised more than £1,000. Our next step is to approach local businesses and build on community goodwill to grow our campaign through the winter term. Yvonne Kilvington, beekeeper and outdoor learning assistant, Ashbrow School, Huddersfield
n The British Beekeepers Association’s Bees In The Curriculum online resource for primary school teachers is available at
bbka.org.uk
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