Charity and Fundraising at Presdales School

Presdales School has always considered charity to be an important concept for our students to understand. Annually Presdales raises money for a nominated charity proposed and voted for by students and staff. Other national activities such as MacMillan Coffee Morning and The Poppy Appeal are also supported. Presdales believes that it is important to encourage our students to focus their good work outwards and we have witnessed fantastic independent examples of generosity from our students and their families this year, supporting those in need.

Presdales is supported by an excellent volunteer PA team, which provides invaluable help at key events. These include the annual: Dance Evening, Presdales Rocks and the Drama Production and the Christmas Bazaar. Funds from these events help us to purchase those things that budgets don’t stretch to and these funds will be sorely missed this year.

As a school we find areas where budgets do not extend to cover the cost of new or replacement equipment to be increasing and like everyone have been impacted through Covid 19 with annual activities unable to happen and new ways of working requiring new or different equipment. Seeking external funding from official grants is more important than ever and this receives active focus.

It is in this regard that we would like to mention and offer our sincere thanks to local charity EdufundUK Ltd for their recent support for our grant applications. The team at Edufund launched their charitable work with Hertfordshire schools in 2018. Presdales has received grant support from the very beginning in the areas of STEM, PE and Effective Learning with the purchase of diverse equipment for a 3-D Printer to an egg hatching kit.

Following three recent applications Edufund have supported us once again with grants for four new sewing machines and a class set of dressmaking dummies. This is of great significance to Presdales with student numbers in Textiles Tech increasing and ours being the only school in the local area to offer the subject at A-Level.

Additionally due to letting restrictions due to Covid 19 our PE department recently lost access to equipment it shared with one of our letting customers. Once again Edufund understood our plight and responded to a grant application to support the purchase of two new gymnastic floor rolls with the balance coming from the Dance Evening fund.

We would also like to offer one last note of thanks to Edufund. Presdales School was granted the major STEM grant in 2019, which included funds for the purchase of 25 visualisers. Who knew just how important they would be – they are making such a positive impact on remote teaching.