It’s All Good Radio Show Launches New Platforms

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At the beginning of this year I was very kindly interviewed by It’s All Good Radio to talk about what we were doing in schools.

It’s All Good Radio Show is an internet radio show which showcases individuals, companies and organisations who are challenging the norm and changing the way we live and work for the better.

Twice a week, on Mondays and Thursdays they broadcast a mix of stories and music focusing on new innovations and thought provoking ideas and projects which encourage us all to get involved in creating a more equitable and sustainable world.

To listen to these broadcasts go to www.itsallgoodradioshow.com/radiopodcasts

The team behind It’s All Good Radio Show have also recently launched two new platforms: “A Million People Doing Good” and “Business Doing Good.”

Debbie Hyde, producer/presenter of the show explains:

Every day we come across stories of individuals and businesses who are changing the way we live and work for the better and we love to share these via Facebook and Twitter and through our broadcasts, but for some time now we’ve wanted to bring all these people together in one place.

And so we are creating A Million People Doing Good and Business Doing Good – a collective space where we discover, share and come together to recognise the tremendous efforts of individuals and businesses across the globe who are making the world a better place and encourage you to connect with them and get involved in their projects.

We would love to hear from you if you are one of ”A Million People Doing Good” or a “Business Doing Good” or if you know someone who is doing great work and should be recognised and celebrated.

To find out more and get involved go to www.itsallgoodradioshow.com , Facebook: It’s All Good Radio Show and Twitter @debbiehyde7

A Novel PTA Fundraiser

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On my Google news alert recently there was an article which somewhat amused me. It was a letter from the PTA of a school in the United States (which was originally posted on Facebook by the mother of a pupil) asking parents for monetary donations instead of the traditional volunteer hours, baked cakes or walk-a-thons. See below for this letter which is written very much with a sense of humour in mind:

Click-image-to-enlarge

But it has obviously struck a chord as the post has now been shared over 165,000 times, they have got supportive messages from all over the world and it has been featured on major on-line news networks. People from other PTAs, as well as appreciating the humour and direct honesty, maybe understand and empathise how overwhelming and time consuming these undertakings can be and are now running a similar approach for their schools.

So maybe there is something to take from this? It is certainly fresh and amusing.

Or if you didn’t want to take this type of approach, please contact us as we have lots of other original and creative ideas which you could use – and not a cake needs to be baked either!

For further information, please contact Simon Fearnehough on 01865 858982 or email: simon@hideouthouse.com

www.hideouthouse.com

How To Fund Your School Playground Equipment Project

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We have worked with numerous schools these past 16 years helping them raise funds for playground equipment projects so as a result of this, we have built up a useful knowledge bank of what works and how you can do this successfully and effectively. But sadly there is no easy magic wand which you can wave to immediately muster up the required pot of gold, these projects do take time and with dollops of determination and true grit on top! You need to think outside of the box as well to better your chances of securing funds faster.

You also need to bear in mind that for all of the options open to you as listed below, it might be a mixture of a few of them which gets you to your designated target so it is always best to initially put out as many rods as possible because you never know which big fish might bite first.

1) School Budget – this may sound completely obvious but if the school can donate any funds from its own budget or devolved capital budget, then this is a good start. It financially and psychologically gets you off the starting blocks but also a lot of funders like to see some sort of match funding (or at least a contribution) from the school.
2) Your LEA – put in a call to your local education authority to see if they are running any specific or relevant grant programmes for schools or initiatives in their area. For example, we sold last year an eco outdoor classroom with a living sedum roof to a school in South West London as there was a grant programme to promote cleaner and healthier air in the Borough.
3) Get your PTA on board – so much of our work nowadays comes directly from the efforts of PTAs, God bless them! If you have an active PTA, give them this as their next major project to raise money for but talk to us first about how we can devise some novel & creative fundraising ideas for you. For example, last year we worked with a primary school on developing a pedal powered eco outdoor classroom – so to raise money for this, we put together a pedal powered disco event where the children and parents had to cycle on these special dynamo bikes to produce enough electricity to power up the disco. If they stopped pedalling, so did the music! But more importantly it raised a lot of money because the event enjoyed a very high attendance (because it was novel and fun) but also the PTA charged for both attendance and got everyone to sponsor a bike rider. Plus the event was very relevant to what they were trying to raise money for.
4) Crowd Funding – this is the way the world is going and you need to be part of it. These websites are an excellent way of spreading the news about your project and message to a far wider audience plus you can constantly update them with news, initiatives, targets reached, videos etc. Have a look at the link below for a school in Norfolk who have done this really well and have actually gone over their target amount.
Crowd Funder Brooke School
There are also some other specialist educational crowd funding websites such as Hubbub.
5) Commercial Sponsorship and Donations – get together a list of potential companies you could approach who might donate some money towards your project. But I have seen so many schools do this really badly and as a result, consequently don’t get anywhere. The most important thing is to put yourselves in the shoes of the person or organisation being approached – how are you going to make them part with some cash to help you? We have actually published a whole paper on this subject matter and how you can do it successfully. Please contact us for further details.
6) Individuals – similar to above. Do you know of any local wealthy or benevolent individual who could help out? If you don’t ask, you don’t get. A school we worked with in Lancashire personally approached the owner and MD of a local oil company with the children listing all of the reasons why this new school playground equipment would benefit them. They were just as surprised as I was when he wrote back with a cheque for £10K attached!
7) Grants – this is a whole big subject worthy of a separate blog but suffice it to say there are numerous grants out there which could possibly fund or partially fund your project. But you have to know where to look for them and you have to know how to apply for them correctly. With the harsh winds of austerity blowing ever more into the educational sector, the competition for these grants has become ever greater. But we have a lot of experience here and without wishing to brag, we took on six school projects earlier this year to see if we could help them access grant money to pay for our products we had quoted for. Five of them we have successfully helped get the required funding for – so not a bad hit rate.

So if you would like any further advice on any of the above or if you have a specific upcoming project in mind, then please contact us as below:

Simon Fearnehough on 01865 858982 or email: simon@hideouthouse.com or visit School Grant Funding

What Exactly Are Eco Classrooms?

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The Green Room

These type of eco friendly buildings are becoming ever more popular in schools but what exactly are they? And why are they different from standard classroom buildings?

One could simply argue that any building is now eco friendly as current building methods and building regulations stipulate that they have to be thermally efficient on account of their insulation properties (indeed for larger buildings you have to submit SBEM  – simplified building energy model – calculations which essentially provide for an analysis of building energy consumption and Co2 emission rates). If they are timber clad, you would also need to ensure that the original source of the timber supply is either FSC or PEFC accredited or certified – basically this ensures that for every tree cut down, another one is planted.

But you can go a whole step further in the design of eco classrooms to ensure they are truly eco friendly:

*Sedum Living Roofs – these can usually only be applied to flat or shallow mono pitch roofs because they do not work with steep roof pitches. And they tend to be more expensive than other roof systems as the building has to be structurally  “beefed up” in order to take the extra weight of the sedum and its underlays. BUT they do naturally absorb CO2 from the atmosphere, sedum is a natural insulator and they attract all sorts of bio-diversity

*Renewable Energy – dependent upon the power load required for your classroom building, you can use solar panels and wind turbines to provide some if not all of the electricity. Usually however these type of systems provide for say 40% of the overall electricity pull with the rest coming directly from the grid. However you can also earn money from solar panel systems by feeding electricity back into the grid as well as benefitting from the lower energy bills. We have also worked on projects where some of the power is generated by children pedalling special dynamo bikes!

*Air source heat pumps – act both as a combined space heating and air conditioning unit but they produce less C02 than traditional systems because air is the main component being used which of course is a renewable resource

*Guttering and water butts – these can be used as rainwater harvesting systems

*LED lighting and sun pipes in the roof to allow in extra natural light

And of course the added benefit is that these type of eco classrooms teach the children about environmental issues and demonstrate how we can lead more of a sustainable life.

For more information, please contact Simon Fearnehough on 01865 858982 or email simon@hideouthouse.com

or simply visit

The Hideout House Company Ltd

 

the eco centre

the eco classroom

How to Choose Which Type of School Classroom Building to Buy

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Many schools are now facing up to the dilemma of how they are going to resolve the problem of providing extra classroom space. And do you plan for the short term or the long term?

If you opt for the short term solution and look to rent a classroom building (because it is difficult to know if a school classroom bulge might just be a temporary trend plus you may have to take potential restrictive budgets into account), you might want to consider just how cost economical overall this actually will be. The reason being – even if you are putting in a temporary classroom, it will usually still require full planning permission as a building is only deemed to be temporary if it is sited for 28 days or less. In a school scenario, I doubt this will be the case. So you will still incur all of the cost of filing an application to your local planning authority and putting together the required information and drawings. The likelihood too is that you will also still have to apply for full building regs (or your building supplier will usually do this on your behalf but there is still a cost for the application to be made to the local building control officer and all of the structural calculations to be submitted).

And then there is the cost of delivery and siting the unit….and then when you don’t want the building anymore, another further cost to de-commission it and take it away again. And whether you rent it for one day or five years, you will still need to put down the required baseworks/groundworks for the building to sit on plus the connection of services including electricity, foul drainage and water. These elements are “un-rentable” as you cannot simply take them away once the building is no longer required.

But mobile or modular classroom buildings do have obvious advantages over traditional build-on site classroom buildings. And in this instance, a mobile classroom is usually defined as a pre-manufactured unit built on a chassis (which comes in either one or two sections dependent upon overall size) which is delivered directly to site on the back of a low-loader truck. It is already fully kitted out internally with all electrics, plumbing, lighting, heating, partitioning etc so its great advantage to a school is that on-site time is minimal compared to a traditional build. A typical mobile classroom build would be 2 weeks on site (including all groundworks) whereas as a build-on site contract would typically be 8-10 weeks – so a lot more disturbance to the school day or term.

However access can sometimes be an issue for mobile classrooms as it is has to be fairly easy to site the building within the school grounds onto its designated site. If access is a major issue, it is still possible to crane a building in but this obviously adds to the overall cost.

But nowadays mobile classroom buildings are built to the exacting standards of a traditional build and with attractive design and aesthetics in mind – flat roofs, pent roofs or traditional pitch, choices of external cladding including cedar, thermowood or Canexel ( a type of plastic wood which requires very little maintenance). Eco mobile classrooms are becoming increasingly popular too and these type of classrooms include for living sedum roofs, solar and wind power, air source heat pumps, eco friendly basework systems etc

For further information as to how we can advise your school on the best solution as well as financing/funding options, please contact Simon Fearnehough on 01865 858982 or email simon@hideouthouse.com

or simply visit school classroom buildings

 

L shaped modular classroom with cedar cladding

L shaped modular classroom with cedar cladding

 

The Benefits to Schools of Recycled Plastic Playground Products

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We consistently hear from schools that one of the most important aspects to consider when buying equipment for the playground – be that outdoor play equipment or table and bench seating – is on-going maintenance. How long is it really going to last? What do we have to do each year to maintain it? Will you do this or does our site manager have to do it? These are all questions we regularly get asked every single week.

So this is the great thing about using recycled plastic as an alternative material to traditional timber. Quite simply – it needs little or none on-going maintenance as it doesn’t rot, splinter or degrade over time. Of course, it has other attractive properties such as it is less flammable than wood, is water, frost and damp resistant and is very eco friendly as it is made out of recycled plastic bottles.

This is why we are looking to manufacture more and more of our products in this material! Plus your caretaker or site manager can rest easy in the knowledge that he or she will not have to spend their waking hours maintaining it.

For further information, please contact Simon Fearnehough on 01865 858982 or email: simon@hideouthouse.com or please visit

recycled plastic play equipment

 

PTA Fundraising Ideas

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As we spend a lot of time nowadays working with PTAs, we have deliberately made it our business to try and help these good people of the world raise money for their school (and our products!). And without wishing to brag, we have been rather successful at it and have recently secured funding for quite a few schools for outdoor classrooms for example.

But we have also devised novel fundraising events such as pedal powered film or disco nights where you have to pedal on special bikes to create electricity for the music or film. So you get two bites of the cherry as it were – a sponsored bike ride and a novel night out which you can charge people to come to.

We have a special arrangement too with the green energy supplier Ecotricity where you can very easily earn money for your school. And as part of our overall service, we can help you with grants which support schools and our type of products.

And not a single cake needs to be baked!

If you are interested in working with us or hearing more about the above, please contact Simon Fearnehough on 01865 858982 or email simon@hideouthouse.com

www.hideouthouse.com

Eco Schools Activities for Outdoor Classrooms

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We have developed some creative activities for outdoor classrooms which include features to promote a lot of the core themes of the Eco Schools programme – namely renewable energy, bio-diversity, growing and healthy living. First of all though, you need access to the following essential ingredients:

* Outdoor classroom or shelter – preferably with a living sedum roof and an internal mini dipping pond

* Dynamo electric pedal bikes which produce electricity when pedalled

* Mini wind turbine/solar panel and energy monitoring board with power sockets

* Guttering and water butt for rainwater harvesting

* Planters

So now we have an outdoor classroom which is actually a learning resource too. For bio-diversity, the children can see how the sedum on the roof changes colour and texture and how it attracts wildlife. And in no time at all, the mini dipping pond will be thriving with life and providing a natural habitat for all sorts of creatures. For renewable energy, children can pedal on the special dynamo electric pedal bikes to create power which can then be used for all kinds of creative outdoor learning exercises; they can monitor the energy created by the wind turbine or solar panel and then use this to power up laptops, tablets etc. And they can plant and grow their own food which is turn is fed and watered by natural rainwater.

And this happens all year round as well!

For further information as to how your school can benefit from the above, please contact Simon Fearnehough on 01865 858982 or email simon@hideouthouse.com

 or visit eco school activities

The Green Roomoption

Grants and Funding for Outdoor Classrooms

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Just Sit Back and We Will Do All The Hard Work!

As we sell a lot of classroom buildings in their various guises, we have made it our business to understand and research how a school can raise the necessary funds to pay for them. And it needn’t cost you anything – just a bit of your time and dedication is all that we require!

This past quarter, we have successfully helped five schools raise enough money through grants and other fundraising means to pay for our outdoor classrooms. All it cost these various schools was an hour of their time and we did the rest. And if you can factor in the efforts of your school’s PTA, then even better.

We deal with schools every day and at the moment, there seems to be a shortage of two vital elements – direct funding from the Government for projects such as these and a teacher’s time to try and find other alternative means of funding them. But we can help you and have so far proved to be rather successful at it. You can then get on with what you do best.

For more information on the above, please contact Simon Fearnehough on 01865 858982 or email: simon@hideouthouse.com

or visit grant funding for schools

How To Buy A School Classroom Building

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mobileclassroom_13       mobileclassroom_14

I think it is fair to say that we have had quite a lot of experience over the years in working with schools when they are looking for a new classroom building. And so we thought we would put together a very brief list of the sequential “steps” to help you facilitate what sometimes can be quite a daunting task.

Step One

Be very clear about what you want this new building to “do” and what you require within it – i.e. does it need internal WCs, how much actual classroom teaching space do you require, do you need to have extra storage space, is a kitchenette area with sink and microwave required? Is it just going to be used exclusively by the school or is there a wider community use for it perhaps (this can sometimes be quite important if you are looking for external funding). So have a clear project plan in place and establish any local need if so required.

Step Two

Once you have decided upon the above, you now need to get the initial buy-in from your Governors to proceed further. Without this, you are just going to be wasting your time and those of potential suppliers. I have been on many visits to schools where we have put together quite detailed plans and quotes and only to be later told that the Governors would rather spend the money on something else having not originally been consulted. It can be quite frustrating.

Most important – how are you going to pay for it?? Like above, I have been involved on some many projects where this has not really been addressed initially and it really needs to be. You therefore need to identify as to whether there is money in the school capital budget, can you lease the building perhaps, research if there are there grants available from the local education authority (we keep hearing so much about how the Government are pumping millions into the whole classroom shortage problem) and whether there are non Govt grants which might fund your project – especially if there is a wider community use for your building.

Step Three

At this stage you now need to start to look at potential suppliers for your school classroom building. Have a look at their websites, ask them for testimonials from previous schools they have supplied, see whether they will come out and do a free initial site visit. Ascertain what kind of overall service they can supply – e.g can they offer a complete turn-key system whereby they will undertake all of the associated project work such as applying for planning permission, filing building reg applications, install baseworks, connection of all necessary services etc If so, they will need to give you a comprehensive quote

Step Four

Once you have received in all of the quotes and undertaken as much as due diligence as possible, make your decision as to which company you wish to contract with. Now you need to file a planning permission application to your local authority as no building work can be done until you have this. In some instances a building regulation application can be filed at the same time to the building control officer in order to save time.

Step Five

If you are planning on siting this new classroom building onto an existing playing field area at the school, you will also need to check whether you have to file for Section 77 Approval and details on this can be found on the below link:

https://www.gov.uk/school-land-and-property-protection-transfer-and-disposal

If you do, you cannot start any work until you have authorisation.

Step Six

Once you have all of the above approved, agree a build schedule with the supplier/contractor and make sure that it is stuck to!

Step Seven

Move in!

If would like to discuss how we can help your school with your new classroom project, then please do contact us.

For further information, please contact Simon Fearnehough on 01865 858982 or email simon@hideouthouse.com

or please visit school classroom buildings