We are delighted to award Harvey Road Primary School (Croxley Green) a grant to help purchase a new permanent liner for their swimming pool. We rarely contribute to large projects as we would rather the maximum £1,000 we can award facilitate a quickly implemented, discrete project that makes a big difference. However, we made an exception in this case as Harvey Road was going to have to close their 50 year-old pool which was the last primary pool in the area and they had been working so hard to raise the funds to keep it open. Once they had confirmed they had the rest of the funding in place, we were able to send our cheque to complete their project.
As Clare Wallis, School Business Manager, explained, the pool benefits a wide range of children, not just in Harvey Road School:
"We carried out a parent survey and 94.1% of parents would like us to keep the pool and therefore we are committed to raising the funds to support the refurbishments. We teach 210 children swimming every year and for 36% of those children, their only experience in a swimming pool are their lessons at school, which is an astonishingly high figure.
"In addition, by carrying out these refurbishments we will not only be able to provide swimming lessons for our children, but also provide access to the 3 other primary schools in Croxley Green (who are not as fortunate as us and do not have a swimming pool). We also intend to hire the pool to local community groups to enable a greater number of children to benefit from our facilities.”