Friends of The Vineyard
Download Autopay and Gift Aid forms here:
The Friends of the Vineyard School (the Friends), is a registered charity set up some years ago by a group of parents to provide a tax efficient mechanism for receiving donations to the school.
Like most state schools, the Vineyard faces a challenging time financially. The extra features that help to raise the quality of our education and set the Vineyard apart from other schools come in increasingly large part from parent funded activities - PTA fundraising and parental donations.
We need your support. We ask every Vineyard family to contribute a minimum £90 (or £7.5 through monthly direct debit), although many of our families generously choose to make monthly donations that far exceed this.
Each year this fund contributes an additional £10, 000 to £20, 000 to the school budget. In recent years, donations made to the Friends have funded, among other things, dedicated Vineyard supply staff and provision of additional classroom teaching assistants, as well as upgrading of our technology through purchase of laptops and installation of interactive whiteboards in the classrooms. Recently very generous one-off donations through the Friends also enabled the successful school meals project to go ahead, whereby we upgraded our kitchen to allow healthy meals to be produced on site, by our own full time chef instead of using the borough’s catering service of meals made off site, shipped in and reheated.
Please consider contributing to the Friends. Direct debit and gift aid forms are attached for those who wish to commence payments now.
All contributions to the Friends are entirely voluntary and confidential. Families should feel under no pressure to make a financial contribution. We recognise that Vineyard families contribute to the school in many ways other than financially and these are all much appreciated.