April 2017
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37
Schools
Wheatfield parent wins PlayPod funding from Greencore Dragons
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Bradley Stoke primary school has been successful in winning project funding from a major business in the town, following a gruelling Dragons’ Den style assessment process. Greencore Prepared Meals, which produces own-brand ready meals for a number of supermarket chains at a factory in Hawkley Drive, has awarded Wheatfield Primary School £920 to fund its incredibly popular Scrapstore PlayPod for one year. The PlayPod is a purpose-built walk-in structure that contains a vast collection of materials and objects that businesses routinely throw away, from giant flexible tubes, crates, drums and netting to unwanted phones, keyboards, packaging and workwear. Pupils at the school are given the opportunity to play creatively with the scrap material at break times, which they wholeheartedly embrace. Scrapstore PlayPods have been shown to transform children’s daily experiences at school by encouraging them to play together across age and friendship groups and to take and assess risk for themselves. PlayPods have also reduced the level of playground disputes, which means teachers spend less time in the classroom dealing
with issues after the lunchtime break. Moreover, children return to the classroom energised and ready to learn. The Wheatfield PlayPod was originally installed at the school in 2012 at a cost of £15,000. It is maintained by Bristol based charity Children’s Scrapstore, who restock it six times a year. The money awarded by Greencore is the result of a community support initiative which encourages members of staff to make a ‘pitch’ to their leadership team to ask for support for a local cause that is close to their heart. The winning pitch for the PlayPod funding was made by Greencore team leader Jaroslaw Klos, who has a child in Year 3 at Wheatfield. To celebrate the award, Wheatfield Primary School invited representatives from Greencore Prepared Meals and Children’s Scrapstore to visit the school during lunch break on Tuesday 7th March, so that they could witness pupils enjoying the PlayPod materials. All the scrap used in a Scrapstore PlayPod is clean and safe waste which is collected from around 350 Bristol-area based small, medium and multinational businesses and manufacturers. The Children’s Scrapstore collects
Greencore staff Ben Long (HR manager, left), Vicki Legomski (HR Advisor, 2nd from right) and Jaroslaw Klos (team leader, right) join acting headteacher Lois Haydon to celebrate Greencore’s funding of the school’s PlayPod
on average around 100 tonnes of business waste materials every year from the Bristol area.
To find out more about Children’s Scrapstore PlayPods, visit www.playpods.co.uk
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