King Alfred School in Lower Gornal Are Raising Money To Move To Bigger School

Transcript

00:00I'm Hayley Bowen, I'm the headteacher and co-founder of the King Alfred School,

00:04this is where we are today. We founded the school in 2021, it's set up by a team of

00:10local teachers and parents and the idea is to make high quality education accessible

00:16to even one income household. So initially when we started the school we didn't know

00:21if this was going to be popular or if there was going to be a great deal of demand. Since opening

00:26we've gone from nine children enrolled to 26 in a short space of time and now we've maxed out our

00:32capacity in this building that you're in now of Lake Street and Methodist Church. So when we first

00:38moved here we operated out of the former Sunday School building and now we have three classrooms

00:46and we're at complete capacity where we are and we need to move to meet growing demand and expand

00:52to secondary education as well as primary as well. We have two classrooms with walls

00:58currently in our school and we have had to make a makeshift classroom in the hall space so you can

01:04really see that that is just behind us there and how desperately we need to move because we've

01:11had to set up a temporary classroom to accommodate our early years class. So we have a number of

01:16people wanting to join the school for a new reception and intake and also some of the higher

01:22years so we we now have more demand than classroom space. The benefit would be we can take our school

01:28from 26 children and we would have capacity in some of the buildings we're looking at to take

01:33over 200 children over the next few years and that means that we could open up more places to local

01:39families and really I suppose grow our impact in the region. We're doing a fundraising event

01:46tomorrow evening which is so Tuesday the 14th of Jan at Himley Hall so there's an evening fundraiser

01:52so if anyone is interested and they want to come along that's taking place at Himley Hall at

01:596.30 tomorrow evening and we're really looking for local people to get involved because this is a

02:04local grassroots initiative to make high quality education accessible so we really want to engage

02:10with with local people and we want their input because we believe parent-led schools are fantastic

02:16and we want people from all different industries to come and get involved and we we really want

02:21this to be a you know it's a community funded charity so we really want to get the feedback

02:26and the support of our local people here.