As a maintained school, our budgets are 'delegated' from the County Council. We work off a tight budget and we have to be creative in our requirements and bolster our finances with fundraising activities. This enables us to offer the children enrichment activities we may not otherwise be able to do.

This Financial Benchmarking and Insights Tool enables you to see how we compare with other schools in a similar position in terms of how we allocate funds: https://financial-benchmarking-and-insights-tool.education.gov.uk/school/115617

Each year there are additional grants we can access to obtain additional funding to be spent in specific ways. In 2023, we obtained a grant of £10,000 to repair the roof on our hall and store room. In 2025, GCC has agreed to fund the renovation and refurbishment of the inside of the old office building/store room to enable us to bring it back into use as a meeting and intervention space, in addition to improving our storage facility. 

 

Sports Premium

In the academic year 2023/2024, we received £17,285 sports premium grant. The intention of this funding is to improve the outdoor activity we offer as a school. It cannot be spent on sports equipment but can be used to facilitate additional outdoor activity offerings above and beyond the national curriculum requirements, playground markings for outdoor play and forest school related activities.

This is how we used this budget for the academic year 23/24:

Playground markings – we created a new woodland trail on one of our playground spaces, as well as a hopscotch, jumping activity and dance corner. This new surface cost £8,945.

Forest school enablement – we encourage outdoor learning at Coberley, and we employ a teacher weekly to provide this enrichment activity. We now have all-weather shelters to keep the children’s outdoor learning shoes and overalls in to support the easy access to this activity. This cost £1,790.

Sports club – this is offered after school to all students as a free of charge activity. We run this weekly, so the cost for the year amounts to 38 weeks x £45, which equals £1,710.

Sports tournaments - we offered sports tournaments this year for the first time in many years, enabling our pupils to compete against other small schools, which amounted to £782.

Spiritual garden – we created an outdoor space for the children to think, to interact and to enjoy the outdoors. This was largely led by our Year 6 children, but attracted costs in its creation for additional expertise. These costs amounted to £750.

Gardening club – We started a gardening club this summer, which was kindly run by parents and open to all children. The preparation of the garden area amounted to £600.

Swimming lessons - We topped up our swimming provision and enabled everyone in the school to have 10 lessons over the course of the year. This cost an additional £1250.50 in lessons over and above our basic swimming provision and we used the remaining £1,457 to subsidise our high transport costs by coach for these lessons. 

Total spent: £17,285