Photo project boosts school funds
BALLACHULISH Primary School raised more than £100 by choosing to ‘keep it local’ for its school photographs.
Enterprising pupils from Ballachulish decided to go local for their yearly photographs and raised £140 for the school fund.
Ballachulish Primary School approached Iain Ferguson of The Write Image about taking school portraits and he suggested involving the Pupil Council (PC) to help organise the event as an enterprise project which would also raise funds for the school.
With the PC on board, together with Iain, a plan of action was drawn up. This was developed in follow-up meetings to work out the detail on what type of pictures they would like, the sizes they should offer, where the studio could be set up, how long would be needed to take each picture and organise times for each individual, class and whole school pictures.
The pupils designed and printed out booking forms to take home to parents, made lists showing who was coming at what time and set up a graphical code which could be scanned by a mobile phone to take people straight to a specially- created website.
On the chosen day, Iain and his colleague John Paul Peebles set up the studio in the ‘spare’ classroom, while members of the pupil council collected those to be photographed from their classroom or nursery, as well as welcoming parents and younger brothers and sisters into the school, showing them to the waiting area and looking after them.
Head teacher Carol Divers had also suggested taking a whole school picture in the playground so that children and staff could look back in years to come and remember the building. The weather was cold and wet, but once again the pupil council helped out by making continuous checks on the weather, rushing in to announce a weather window, then helping to set up chairs outdoors in just a few minutes. This picture was also turned into a calendar by Iain and John Paul who donated 20 copies to the school, which the children sold at the Christmas Fair, raising an additional £40.
Iain said: ‘The pupil council was impressive, so well organised, polite and enthusiastic. It was a great pleasure to work with them and they learned everything so quickly which was a big help. Thank you also to the staff and parents for their support, which allowed the children to make their project such a success and raise a total of £140 for the school.’