2024-08-31-accounts

Annual General Meeting for Little Acorns (Colleton) Pre-School CIO

Report to parents 2023 – 2024 Thursday 27th February 2025 at 7:30pm

Registered charity no. 1189027

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Little Acorns (Colleton) Preschool CIO Committee Chair Kate Harper-Cole Vice Chair Phillipa Irving Treasurer Bob Harper Secretary Alana Duncan Fundraising Phillipa Irving, Amber Gaussen

Teaching staff Manager Joanna Blunden (resigned 1/2024) Co-Manager Jo Logan (from 1/2025) Co-Manager Lisa Perrott (from 1/2025) Deputy Jane McCarthy Sarah Fill Qualified Bridget Mundy Emma Irwin Manju Modhavadiya Mel Scott Pat Irving Sheila Barton Stacey Leadbetter Sui Mei Lam Unqualified Ann Croft Anna Witts Jo Roper Steph Robilliard Teresa Morton Kate McGuigan

Support staff and special functions SENDCo Jo Logan/Lisa Perrott Designated Safeguarding Leads: Jane McCarthy, Jo Logan, Lisa Perrott

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Agenda:

1. Welcome – Introduction from the Chair

1. Treasurer’s Report

2. Manager’s Report

3. Fundraising Report

4. Holding Trustees

5. Committee Changes

6. Thank you

7. AOB

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1. Introduction from the chair

Welcome to the 2024 AGM and the review of the academic year 2023 to 2024, this is being held at the beginning of 2025 but relates to the previous academic year. This year will be another opportunity for a hybrid AGM, we have learned that more families can join us with an option to dial in from home due to childcare for their little ones being much easier. Please bear with us and use the chat box for any questions which we can address at the end.

It has been another busy year for Little Acorns! The staffing team have continued to work steadfastly, and with great passion to ensure every child receives high-quality childcare and provision. Lisa Perrott and Jo Logan had initially agreed to co-manage Little Acorns while we have been advertising and appointing a new preschool manager. The recruitment of a preschool manager has as of yet been unsuccessful. Lisa and Jo have very kindly agreed to continue managing the preschool in this interim period. We are hugely grateful to them for taking on this joint role and it has been wonderful to hear from several staff members about how well they feel the preschool is led and managed by Jo and Lisa.

The committee has continued to work towards improved financial stability this year. This was helped by the increase in preschool fees for two-year-olds and three and four-year-olds from the previous year, as well as the increase to the wraparound care fee. As a result for the second year in a row, we are continuing to run with a small profit rather than a deficit budget, as was the case two years ago.

The AGM is the time to elect the members of the committee to run the preschool for the coming year and this year we are hoping to appoint some new committee members to expand the team, and for succession, planning, particularly in anticipation for when some

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committee members may want to move on in the future as their children leave the setting.

Being part of the committee is a great way to meet other parents, get involved and truly make a difference to the preschool. We are able to support the leadership team to help Little Acorns as the high quality childcare provider that it is. If there are any parents or carers who have an interest in joining the committee please please do get in touch with Jo Logan or Lisa Perrott, or any other of the committee members.

Lastly, I would just like to reiterate how incredibly thankful I am to all the dedicated staff and committee members. Our staff are passionate, caring and highly knowledgeable. This ensures that children settle quickly, feel comfortable, learn and have fun. Our committee members are all volunteers and give their time generously to support the smooth running of the preschool. Thank you also to the parents, who work in partnership with the preschool to ensure that children have a supported, positive and enjoyable preschool experience.

Thank you, Kate Harper-Cole. Chair of Little Acorns

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2. Treasurers Report for the Financial Year 01/09/23 -31/08/24

Little Acorns made a small profit in the previous financial year after making a significant loss in the previous two financial years. My focus therefore, in my second year as Treasurer has been to try and ensure that we maintained our profitability and if possible improve upon it.

Income.

Council Funding increased from £134,725 last year to £190,654 and parental fees and income from the After-School Club rose from £80,894 to £101,091, which reflects the significantly improved uptake of places and the fact that the setting has become a popular choice for parents. Fundraising income has been maintained at a similar level to last year.

When grants and interest income are also considered, our total income rose from £228,565 to £299,966 an increase of more than £71,401.

Outgoings.

You will not be surprised to learn that our operating costs have also increased. Premises costs have increased significantly from £13,209 to £22,305 a large proportion of this increase is due to higher rent, council tax, insurance and maintenance costs.

Staffing Costs have risen from £198,512 to £220,170 an increase of £21,658, however almost £3,000 of this is made up of the increased costs of pensions, training and payroll administration. The remainder is due to increased wages, a proportion of which has been triggered by the increase in the National Minimum Wage. However, wages costs have been significantly mitigated by the fact that two of the existing staff very helpfully agreed to co-manage the Preschool after the previous manager’s departure.

Overall Position

We have improved from a small profit last year to a healthy £29,926 this year. Our total funds carried forward were £51,610. The balance on our main bank account as at 1[st] September 2024 was £85,306.78.

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Our separate Reserve Fund increased from £43,980.35 to £44,344.40 and our Fundraising Account had a balance of £10,553.15.

Our targets for the next financial year should therefore be to do everything we can to keep costs under control, continue the excellent fundraising activity and maintain our Reserve Fund as closely as possible to the Charity Commission’s recommended amount of 3 months operating costs.

Bob Harper Treasurer Little Acorns (Colleton) Preschool

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3. Co-Manager’s Report for AGM February 2025

Thank you all for coming today and taking an active interest in preschool.

It has now been a year since Jo Blunden left the preschool, with Jo and I stepping in as acting co-managers. We have been well supported by the committee and the excellent staff team during this time and have also appreciated support and feedback from families. Thank you.

It has, overall, been a successful year at Little Acorns and we are now in a position where we are running waiting lists for this current academic year, along with a list for September 2025 and even 2026! It came as a bit of a surprise to be so popular but we are now more-orless full with only a couple of individual sessions left. We are having to be thoughtful about the balance between 2 and 3 or 4 year olds so that our higher than minimum ratios can be maintained, offering a higher level of supervision and learning opportunities than the national expectation.

Staffing

We have said goodbye to some staff this year, and welcomed others. Sheila, Pat and Sui Mei have retired, Sarah Fill has become a math’s specialist teacher in a secondary school (and Emma has left for new adventures. Some of you may know that Sheila and Sarah Fill have both come back to see us already! Manju and Sarah Wallace both went on maternity leave to have their daughters and we look forward to welcoming them both back later this year. Lee has also returned from maternity leave and is keen to be working with the children as much as possible! Since Jo’s departure, we have welcomed Ann and Anna and they both feel as if they have been here forever! More recently, Hayley Simpson has joined us on Thursdays and Amy has joined us as a full time member of staff. Jane and Bridget have stepped up as deputy managers on Fridays, with Sarah Fill having shared this role until she left. We are delighted to report that both the adults and the children love working with them both. Jo and I would like to take this opportunity to offer a heartfelt thanks to the entire staff

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team for being so brilliant with the changes we have undergone this past year.

Training and development

We continue to use our regular training providers, and are in the process of bringing all of our newer staff up to the training levels of the rest of the staff team, notably with the Little Acorns expectation that everyone has full paediatric first aid and food hygiene as well as training above and beyond the statutory expectations for safeguarding. We have also refreshed safeguarding lead training and now have 4 DSLs (Jane, Jo L, Kate and Lisa). Jo R and Steph are currently working towards achieving their level 3 qualifications and Bridget is part of the Inclusion Champions training run by Wokingham Early Years Team.

Events and activities

We have had a couple of big events at preschool in the last year. At Easter, we sent out a plea for help from our families to cover some maintenance jobs. Jo and I are delighted that the response was so positive and we got so much done! Thanks again to all of the families who participated in making the preschool safe and welcoming. A special thanks to Ann Brigden for working tirelessly on making the fire exit and tree safe in the back garden. The tree is now felled and the council have re-laid the footpath outside and levelled our fire exit pathway. Jo also came up with a very creative way to link the Olympics to our annual sports day and it was a huge success in terms of turn out, participation, enjoyment and also fundraising. This style of sports day is likely to feature again this year.

Learning and curriculum

We have continued to use Twinkl phonics stage 1, which largely follows the old Letters and Sounds style of introducing phonics to preschool children. This has been really successful for our ‘school leavers’ cohort with Mrs Rowland from The Colleton reporting that her current class settled well into school and showed excellent readiness to learn. The key early listening and attention skills actively taught really support this skill. Younger children continue to use a mixture of singing phonics and very short listening games, along with learning a wide

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range of nursery rhymes. We are developing our curriculum to better incorporate core books. This will be ongoing throughout the rest of the academic year.

Other reports will provide more information about finances, both standard and through fundraising as well as some of the improvements to the building we have been able to make, but I would like to take this opportunity to thank parents and the fundraising team for their continued support because the development of our much loved mud kitchen and the revamp of the sensory room have only been possible because of your hard work and generosity.

Thanks again for your support.

Lisa and Jo

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4. Little Acorns AGM Fundraising Report 2023/24

Following on from raising £1,488.96 in 2022 – 2023 we decided to concentrate on a smaller number of fundraising events, as we were struggling to find volunteers.

To start the fundraising year, we held dress up days and raised money for charities such as Comic Relief and NSPCC. We also had a Halloween dress up day and World Book Day in March and for those events we raised £149.

At Christmas on a really freezing night, we joined in with the Twyford Together fayre selling books, candles and guess the name of the Unicorn, raising £131.

Pre-Christmas we had baubles to decorate and then we had our own Christmas singing concert and mini festive fayre selling hot drinks, mince pies toys and books as well as a visit from Father Christmas in his grotto. This raised us £134.80.

At Easter we started the festivities selling wooden eggs for the children to decorate. Then we had an Easter Bonnet Parade where the children showed off their homemade bonnets walking around the playground of the pre-school and adjacent primary school which was lovely. Some excellent creations! The children then got to take part in an Easter egg hunt, and we had a cake sale, all of this raised us £119.60.

After Easter we tried a new event – the pre-loved tabletop sale which we held at the Twyford District and Youth Centre. We had lots of sellers which was great, and we charged just to hire the tables and a small entry fee for buyers. There were a lot of people with a lot of things to sell – this raised us £241.07.

At the end of May, Colleton School held a Krispy Kreme Doughnut sale, so we had a few stalls to sell books and soft toys there – making use of the footfall! We raised £108.36 from that.

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Asya from ABL photography came to photograph the children and siblings twice during the year, hopefully creating some lovely memories for you! We raised £152.80 from this.

Our final event of 2023-2024 was the summer sports day/Olympics. This was a great afternoon where the children did shotput, hurdles, weightlifting, hobby horse racing, trampolining and a water race. It was a lovely sunny day as well and all the children had a great time! As the children raised sponsorship for the event it was our most successful event of the year, and we raised £1,177.35!

So, in total we raised £2,335.11. This money was spent on new sensory room equipment (fish/bubble tubes, liquid floor tiles and other sensory education items including carpet and lights), a new cover for the den, a gazebo to ensure the children can comfortably play outside in the hot weather and delightful remote-controlled cats and headphones which are very popular with the children.

So far for 2024-2025 we kicked off before term started with a family picnic as a welcome to all Little Acorns returning and new families and sold drinks, toys, books and cakes. Then we had our Christmas events including Twyford Together Christmas Fayre and our very own Christmas fayre and grotto following the singing event, with a very successful addition of a raffle with some great prizes, kindly donated by local businesses. We have a line up of events for 2025 so keep looking at the Whatsapp, Facebook, Classlist and emails!

We’d like to say a special thank you to Rachel, Kirsty, Akshatha, Claire, Monica and Nicole for their help with events this year.

As always, we would absolutely love more help with fundraising, whether that be planning or helping to run them, as without volunteers, a lot of the events can’t go ahead. If anyone can spare time and can help us coordinate and arrange events – please let us know. The money raised through fundraising is vital to the pre-school and directly helps the learning and play environment for your children. Our Lead Fundraiser is leaving us at the end of this year as her daughter is moving up to school, so if anyone is willing to step up that would be great.

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1. Holding Truslees No report 13

2. Financial report Statement of Financial Activity Little Acorns Icolletonl Pre-school CIO Fortht yèarendèd 31 August 2024 IncominBREsour(os j￿￿51 .715 YJJST hErlnramE mInD￿05 F￿ndr&S￿8 2.49 27Q TiknllntDminERe5UWtE5 RIY￿r£￿sEX OpEratifrg105tsiN￿E2l nded 22583 20.25L StaWCD5ts1N￿E4 J74 1%5L2 17 I￿3 inirtttEh 270WD ka6.198 NÈtinciJthinrJloutgollyJrttOurtes Moveme￿tin FufSs Total Fu￿SerOu8htF￿￿ 59.243 59243 2x201 tithedPO￿￿d Total FU￿5(ar[￿dF￿vWA 79111 51hLQ 14

Balance Sheet Little Acoms Icolletonl Pre-school CIO As at 31 August 2024 FlxedAssets Currertass(4S J4lJ45 Pr Prepa¥Tr￿ Credltor5..arnrAmtsfa￿'r4dMItIUn1￿￿j 4J4 Tthj 5ÉJ43 61.5Y NÈtiurr¢Thtaswtsllilidu) T•0 Il•tAss•ts FundolthChlty io 15

1. Committee Changes

12. Thank you

13. AOB

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