‘Like a tree planted by streams of water, which yields its fruit in season and whose leaf does not whither; whatever they do prospers. ’ Psalms 1:3
Splash Community Projects came in for a week and started to produce their magic. The bulk of the construction work was carried out over a long, hot, exhausting weekend in July. We managed to get 35 family and community members to come in, to learn a new skill, to show off their DIY talents and to build something amazing.
What you see below is the result of a REAL team performance: families, staff and the community coming together for the good of our children. We had support from Waves café in Selsey who provided hot bacon sandwiches each day; support from Hope Plants who donated the bark and plants for our planters, as well as support from the local trades folk who gave up their time to come and help build it.
Check out our carousel of photos below.
Our old playground equipment was much loved, but it was looking sad and we were having to close bits off regularly due to H&S reasons. First we lost the slide, then the wobbly log, then the climbing wall and finally the rope bridge. Considering that our school values are 'Enjoy, achieve, aspire' we were finding that there was less and less enjoyment being had, and it was definitely time to aspire and achieve a change.
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After lots of quote-gathering and planning over several months, we decided that we would need to do some serious fundraising if we were going to get the money to make this happen. We knew we needed about £100,000 to get what we really wanted, in both the playground and for some modernisation of our EYFS area. We knew this was a massive amount of money and for a school like ours that seemed a real challenge - so we started thinking outside the box. We were lucky enough to be put in touch with Splash Community Projects, who we appointed to do the project. Splash are a charitable organisation who run community projects, and when we first discussed using our local community and parents to actually help build this (thus saving money on labour), we began to get really excited about turning this into a project for us all to get our teeth into.
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Next we had to look at fundraising, as there was no way we would ever be able to afford this as a school. A huge thank you must go to The Woodger Trust for their very generous donation, to West Wittering parish Council, to The Witterings Pub, the FPTA and to a number of other sponsors who helped to bring this to life. We are incredibly grateful for all of the kind generosity that we have been shown as a school. The smiles on the children's faces when they play on our wonderful new equipment, hopefully makes it all worth it.