It could be you! Banbury school launches lottery

Banbury Academy and Banbury Space Studio will launch the school lottery in 2017 with the first prize draw to be held on January 21.

The lottery is run by an Oxford-based company, Your School Lottery, which has set up the similar schemes with primary schools across the country. Banbury Academy the first secondary school in the county to run one.

Tracie Darke, director of operations at the school, said: “No one else in Oxfordshire has done it. A parent who has a child in primary school in south Northamptonshire said they had a lottery so I asked who it was. I rang up the company, Your School Lottery, and said can we have one in a secondary and they said yes.”

The scheme will work on two levels. Of the £1 spent on each ticket, 40 pence will go directly to either the Academy or Space Studio depending on which lottery draw you play.

A further 30 pence will go directly to the local prize draw prize amount which will get bigger as more people play and six pence will be used for the weekly guaranteed grand prize of £25,000, a sum collated from all the school lotteries the company runs.

The two tier system allows a player to donate directly to a local school while also having the chance to win large amounts of money.

Although the final amounts of both the localised, weekly prize funds and the money the school hope to raise will be dependent on the lottery’s popularity, the school is estimating a yearly income of £3,000 will be generated.

Tracie said: “ We’ve identified that we need to help pay for things that we do, that we don’t get money for - for things in our clubs and the stuff that we do at lunchtimes that we don’t get income for.

“We give them footballs and cricket equipment that we can’t keep throwing away as we don’t have that covered by the Government.

“With enrichment programs such as trips, we have to ask the children for contributions. So the money will allow us to do more enrichment opportunities.”

Additionally the lottery has not cost the school anything in up-front expenditure. To buy lottery tickets and support the school’s extracurricular activities visit Banbury Academy or Banbury Space Studio