ISSUE 1 | NOVEMBER 2012
FUNDRAISINGNEWS
Welcome to our first fundraising newsletter. We hope to update you on all the School’s current fundraising efforts and ways of giving, as well as outlining where the money raised to date has been spent. It is probably true to say that fundraising began in earnest at Arnold House during Nicholas Allen’s time as Headmaster. Historically, the School has always been able to rely on strong support from current and former parents, old boys and friends to help fund major building projects. The creation of a new post however, that of Director of Development, placed fundraising at the centre of the School’s activities so that strategic aims could be planned for and realised. At the turn of the century a significant amount was raised to enable Nos 1, 2 and 3 Loudoun Road to be reconfigured into ‘one school’ rather than three separate buildings. By 2007 enough had been donated to support the redevelopment of the playing fields and pavilion at Canons Park into a multipurpose activity centre; complete with theatre, field-work rooms and enlarged all-
weather surface to facilitate greater participation in hockey and tennis to complement the major sports of rugby and cricket. More recently Arnold House, along with other independent schools which are charitable trusts, has been obliged by law to demonstrate that its educational activities are beneficial to the public. For that to be the case, schools must do what they can to forge links with other groups and institutions in their communities and where possible, to widen access to families on limited means through the award of bursary places. For the foreseeable future, therefore, there is a real need to establish a sizeable bursary fund and this will be our fundraising priority. In the first three years we have surpassed the £250,000 mark; remarkably generous support in view of the harsher economic climate of recent years. With continued support in
the years to come we must hope to establish an endowment fund of £3 million to secure the bursary scheme in perpetuity. A tall order indeed but one which will establish Arnold House as one of the first prep schools in the country to follow in the footsteps of the great public schools, such as Eton, Rugby, St. Paul’s and Harrow, where bursaries have been commonplace for generations. We are particularly encouraged by the recent announcement in the national press of the formation of the Springboard Bursary Foundation – a charity which hopes to secure funding from private and business sponsors to support 2,000 bursary pupils to the leading boarding schools by 2023. This will undoubtedly heighten the public’s awareness of bursaries in the independent school sector and we will no doubt be asked to play our part.