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Wiveliscombe secondary school with farm seeking financial help

BBC Four students standing in a field next to two sheep. One sheep is standing, the other is sitting. Two of the students are male and two are female. They are all wearing overalls and looking directly at the camera.BBC
The students usually spend four hours per fortnight on the farm

A secondary school that has its own farm is asking for financial support to keep it going.

Kingsmead School in Wiveliscombe, Somerset, uses the site for a Land Based Studies course, which is not funded by the government.

It allows students to learn more about agriculture.

Deputy head Charlie Pierce said: "We like to think that we've got quite an interesting and unique curriculum here."

A piece of land next to the school was transformed about eight years ago, when the staff developed it into the current farm site.

It is home to a variety of animals, including sheep, cockerels and guinea pigs.

Two male school students. The boy on the left has dark hair, a blue shirt and navy blue overalls on. The boy on the left is blonde and wearing a blue shirt and black overalls. Both of them are holding chickens.
The students have been "immensely positive" about the course, Mr Pierce said

The course is led by Jon Matthews, who provides a lot of his own equipment to students tending to the farm.

He is hoping the school can secure a rotavator to help with future plans.

"The Parent Teacher Association are looking at funding that because we plan to turn a large portion of one of the fields into a large vegetable plot so we need a good, heavy duty rotavator and we could really do with our own strimmer, hay and straw as we go through the winter of course for the animals," he said.

"Applied learning courses are not funded from the national curriculum, but from the school's own budget, therefore each department's allocation is inevitably very small.

"We have to rely on the goodwill of others to make it work", he added.

Charlie Pierce, the deputy head at the school, said: "It is obviously more expensive to produce a farm with small pupil-to-teacher ratios and develop that farm than it is to have an English lesson, for example.

"We're surrounded by farms here and we're a rural school so it's obviously the hook for many students here and maybe some students who struggle with academic structured learning, but they come to a farm where they can work with their hands, and its an environment they're familiar with, and they get immense satisfaction from it."

"One of the challenges has been funding, and that is what this appeal is about," he added.

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