South Yorkshire school provides every pupil with reading book thanks to generosity of public

Swallownest Primary School, in Rotherham, said it has been ‘blown away’ by the response to its lockdown reading project in which it aims to bring joy to its families and pupils by delivering a book directly to their door.

Using social media, the school asked families and the general public to donate a book off its Amazon wishlist in the hopes of providing just one book for each pupil – with all donations match funded by Swallownest Primary itself.

Since it launched, the campaign has spread far and wide and so far over 200 books have been purchased for children at the school.

Assistant headteacher Mathew Webb, who is also English Lead, said: “We’ve had a big push recently on reading in school, it’s been our prime focus for over a year. It fit quite nicely with that.

"Our deputy headteacher saw the idea on social media and then we got our heads together and decided to go for it. The wishlist is something we’ve done before, we tend to get Christmas presents bought from parents but we’ve moved away from that again in the last year and half.

"We said we’d rather they spent their money and the children, so they tend to buy us books from that. So, we just asked if they’d be kind enough to buy books that we could give out to our families and we would match fund anything that was spent on the books and buy the equivalent.”

He added: “We were blown away by the response to be honest. We’ve had donations from all over the country, we put it on Twitter and Facebook and people have shared it with friends.

"We’ve had some sent from Scotland, some from the Isle of Wight, a family of a child in our school donated £180 worth of books."

The generous donations mean there are now two books, from a range of genres and authors, for every child at Swallownest Primary to keep.

Some will be included in the food parcels being sent to eligible families, with the others being hand delivered by staff to pupils over the coming weeks.

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