The Education Enrichment Fund is the new name for the “Voluntary Contribution’ and is aimed at parents of children currently at the school.
Why have we changed the name?
Parents of children at other major grammar schools in Northern Ireland are also asked for a “voluntary contribution”. In some schools, the contribution asked for is in the region of £500 per child and between 60% and 80% of those parents regularly pay it!
At Ballymena Academy we suggest a figure of only £120 per child but we are behind other schools in terms of the percentage of parents who pay. We firmly believe that’s not because parents are less willing to pay than their counterparts in other schools, they simply do not know what the voluntary contribution is for.
So, by changing the name of the voluntary contribution to the Education Enrichment Fund, we wanted to choose a name for the fund that better reflects what the contribution goes towards.
Increasing the percentage of parents who pay the contribution will go a significant way to alleviating the financial pressures faced by the school.
