We did it!
How Downlands Community School worked hard to secure funding for its community amphitheatre
‘OUR NEW AMPHITHEATRE IS A CULTURAL RESOURCE FOR ALL’
‘As a maintained comprehensive for 11-16-year-olds in a relatively affluent rural area, our school isn’t eligible for many grants. Despite that, we have secured funding for high-profile projects simply by being tenacious and plugging away. One route we have focused on is
the very real need for cultural and leisure facilities in our local area. As a community school, we act as a focal point for people living nearby, and being able to provide resources that everyone can share and benefit from is very much part of that. Indeed, our most recent Ofsted report commented: ‘The school makes an exemplary contribution to the community; it is a community
6 SUMMER 2021 FundEd
school in action as well as in name.’ Several years ago, we secured bids
totalling almost £1million from the Sport England Big Lottery Fund and Football Foundation for a sports centre and floodlit all-weather sports pitch. We demonstrated a local need for the new school facilities – for example, we could meet community demand that the busy leisure centre down the road was unable to cope with. Our not-for-profit partner, Freedom Leisure, now runs a 500-member gym and sports centre at our site. It generates around 60,000 visits each year; the contract contributes £20,000 annually towards the eventual cost of pitch resurfacing,
and also covers the cost of utilities and maintenance. The model has been highlighted by Sport England as an example of best practice in school-owned community facilities. More recently (and on our third
attempt!), we received Sport England funding for a new dance studio, allowing us to put dance on the curriculum for all students and provide an additional facility for local people of all ages. So when it came to the exciting ambition of
‘We planned for it to be a
facility that we could use all year round, and that meant costs of around £85,000’
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