Cornwall Primary School Gets Green Fingers With Lottery Award
18.03.2008 17:41:00
A scheme to construct a science-based learning garden at St Mark’s VCCE Primary School has been given the green light with the help of a £9,450 grant from Awards for All.
The project is one of 82 in the region sharing grants worth £536,878 in the latest round of the Lottery’s Awards for All programme announced today.
St Mark’s VCCE Primary School will use £9,450 to build an area within the school grounds where pupils, children with special needs and adults can get hands-on experience with organic gardening, wildlife and general agriculture, providing a continuous project to develop and maintain.
Maria Baston, project leader of the learning garden at St. Mark’s VCCE Primary School said: “Receiving this grant means the project can come alive. Without it, we would have had a basic garden: now we can have the Rolls Royce version! Ground works are planned to start over the Easter holidays with an official opening towards the end of the summer term but the children will be able to start planting seeds and benefiting from such an area as soon as next month. This is a very exciting time for all the teachers and pupils within the school.”
The garden will contain sensory plants of different textures and smells, an area where the children can grow vegetables, a habitat area for lizards, bushes with berries to attract birds, a cascading water feature, bird baths, outdoor musical instruments and a community herb garden. The school also plans to hold workshops where the children can build sculptures out of natural materials, to then place in the garden.
Also benefiting from a grant of £3,634 is St Austell Choral Society. The group will purchase staging equipment to improve the quality of its performances.
Anne Keast, head of St Austell Choral Society said: “We were overjoyed when we found out we were receiving this grant. Our 60-strong choir has been depending on hired staging, which has limited availability. The grant will help us purchase a new Q-PLUS stage that we can use wherever we go, enabling all members to perform on a professional, tiered stage which will enhance and project our voices, giving the audience a better experience.
“We hope to have the stage in time for our next concert at St Petroc’s Church in Bodmin. Without the grant it would have taken us years to raise the money needed, and now everyone can benefit from this purchase for years to come.”
Awards for All is the small grants scheme administered by the Big Lottery Fund on behalf of Lottery good cause funders, Arts Council England, Big Lottery Fund, Heritage Lottery Fund and Sport England. The scheme makes awards of between £300 and £10,000 to grass-roots community groups and voluntary organisations.
Mark Cotton, Big Lottery Fund Head of the South West region, said on behalf of the Awards for All funders: “Awards for All supports activities that benefit people right across the age range and in many different fields. I am really pleased that so many projects in Cornwall and across the South-West region will be awarded grants this month for such different and worthwhile initiatives.”
For a full list of award recipients visit: http://www.awardsforall.org.uk/england/news.html
Client name: The Big Lottery Fund
Web link: www.biglotteryfund.org.uk
