CASE STUDY
‘We asked our pupils to Grow a Pound – they raised more than £6,000 towards a new play castle’
O
ur primary school has lovely outdoor space, but in 2019 we decided that our ageing playground was in need of a
major overhaul. The wooden castle needed replacing because it was no longer safe, and our tyres and small wooden play structures were wearing out. We had ambitious plans to create a wide variety of outdoor learning and play spaces, with areas for exploration and imaginative activities, but these had to be put on hold through 2020. As a school, part of our vision is to
equip our children to become caring, responsible global citizens, and we felt that including their voices in the playground design would enable them to make a positive difference to the community. So in early 2021, when Bigwoodplay (who have designed and built play equipment at primary schools across Bath and
12 SPRING 2022 FundEd
Wiltshire) said they could build whatever the children could imagine, we commissioned them for our new castle project. To support the children in
designing their own spaces, one of our parents, Dr Kate Langham, ran workshops with groups of six to eight pupils. She asked the children to model their ideas using cake and sweets (above). They came up with some really creative ideas, such as using strawberry laces as zip wire, while managing not to eat the sweets! We were able to use the workshops as an incentive and reward for children who had followed our school values at playtime. The cake models were translated into scaled drawings that allowed the children to see their ideas as design proposals. The overall playground project is so big that we are completing it in
three stages: the first being the installation of the exciting castle structure that the children helped to design. For this, we needed to raise at least £10,000. To involve our children, we set up a ‘Grow a Pound’ challenge, giving each pupil a pound and asking them to use it to create their own fundraising initiative. More than 100 children
participated and we used the InvestMyCommunity (IMC) platform to enable families to set up electronic campaigns. We also created a ‘Grow a Pound’ hall of fame to celebrate all of the
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