Who are we?
We are a large infant school based in the city of Leicester and provide an outstanding education for 480 children. Unfortunately, the playground facilities we have are not outstanding. We have old equipment that is no longer stimulating or challenging for the children to use:
Why us?
Statistics from the latest Health Ward Profile in 2013 show that the ward is one of the most deprived in the city; there are an estimated 2400 children who live in poverty in the ward. Being in a built up area, many children do not have spaces to play outside after school. We would like to open our doors to these children and install new playground facilities that both our children and the community’s children can use.
The area also has very low outcomes in terms of health and early deaths; 32% of deaths are caused by cardiovascular diseases. Furthermore, healthy eating is significantly worse than the national average, only 10.2% of adults in the ward eat 5+ portions of fruit and veg per day compared to a national average of 22.9% and 24.8% of adults in the ward are obese compared with a national average of 19.8%.
The existing equipment is not challenging, is old or broken. School needs to be a place where children can stretch their legs, get active and interact with their peers. But if you look at our equipment, you can see we need something else!
Our children are lovely and we want to give them lovely things. Could you help us?
What do we need?
We would like to raise £10,000 towards playground equipment. This would help us to install new climbing frames and other challenging play equipment, soft surface areas for safety as well as developing a natural/ wild area for our children to explore. The equipment selected was chosen specifically to help develop co-ordination skills, ball skills, agility and providing a safe setting for exploring risk, physical activity and self-directed play. Installing new equipment would also help to improve health outcomes for our children.
If we do not meet our goal we will use the funding we have raised to put towards partial refurbishment of the playground.