Become the next Glastonbury
We have a big field behind our school that’s quite secluded. For the last 20 years, we’ve used it to hold our own music festival, Music in the Park. We hire a huge inflatable stage with professional light and sound equipment and schedule around six bands across the day – a mixture of professional covers bands and up-and-coming groups featuring ex-pupils. We also have our own resident DJ, a mum whose three kids went to the school. We don’t pay the performers, but we do pay for their expenses, and food and drink on the day. We have a barbecue, a licensed bar, face painting, ice-cream vans, a glitter bar and stalls selling things like hats and glasses. Everyone who comes says it feels more like a music festival than
a PTA event. Over the years, it’s become such a big occasion that we’ve had to set up a subcommittee of the PTA just to run it, and we start organising it in November. We sell adult tickets for £15 (£18 on the gate), but children go free. We have to limit ticket sales to 1,000. We get sponsorship wherever we can and even have sponsors for individual Portaloos. All the sponsors get free adverts in our festival programme, and we sell the rest of the advertising space at £25-£100 per ad. Our costs are in the region of £7,000, but on our anniversary year we made a record profit of £12,000. John Black, former joint lead of the Music in the Park PTA organising group, Bentfield PTA, Stansted (214 pupils)
Cultural events
If you’re looking to organise a fundraising event with a unique cultural twist, take inspiration from these PTAs
34 SPRING 2024
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Programme a
speakers’ festival Since 2019, we’ve been running two speakers’ festivals a year – one for Black History Month and the other for International Women’s Day. We’re a local authority maintained girls school in a very ethnically and economically diverse area, so they reflect the interests and demographic of our pupils. We try to get speakers who can talk about a range of professional and creative experiences, and we’ve had some great contributors. Two weeks before Nazanin Zaghari-Ratcliffe was released from prison, a human rights lawyer from her team spoke at one of our events. In the past, we’ve had an international development expert, the UK’s first black female ambassador, a leading
AS TOLD TO: NUALA CALVI
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