We at Belleville School have an active and social Parent Teacher's Association (PTA). In September once you have found your feet hopefully you will want to find out a little bit more about us. The purpose of this letter is to tell you about a couple of important events we arrange at the beginning of term to help you settle in.

First and foremost we organise a picnic for reception children and parents/carers so they can meet each other before school starts in September. This will be held on Monday 1st September from 1 pm in the dog free area by the bandstand at Clapham Common. If it is wet, we’ll meet in the Bandstand Cafe.
During the picnic we will be gathering names and contact details so that we can put together class lists. This is to help you arrange play dates for your children with their new class mates. It is not compulsory and isn't used by the PTA to hound you!

There will be a New Parents Social Evening on Thursday 2nd October from 8.15pm at the school. This is a social evening where you get a chance to meet and share a glass of wine with parents old and new. We explain a little bit more about the PTA but it is not a hard sell and you won’t come away having signed away any newly acquired free time.

We will be holding a PTA Open Meeting on Tuesday 7th October 9.15am at the school which everyone is welcome to attend. Historically the main aim of the PTA was to raise money to improve facilities of the school: money raised by the PTA helped fund the building of the art room. More recently a combination of a healthy bank balance and well equipped school has meant our focus has shifted more to arranging social events. We do still raise a lot of money for the school: over the last two years we have provided interactive white boards for the classrooms still without one.

There are two more events planned for the autumn term: first the Quiz Night on Friday 14th November from 7.30pm, at the school. Organise yourselves into a team and see if you can beat the teachers; then the Christmas Fair on Friday 5th December from 3.30pm after school. Plenty of fun for the kids and a chance to get into the Christmas spirit with Santa's Grotto, music and mulled wine.

These events don't run themselves so at some point we will be asking for people to help. We have a class rep system, which means each class has one or two parents who relay information from the committee or people organizing the events to everyone else in their class. We will hopefully recruit reps for the new Reception classes. Then they can tell you what is going on and you decide how much or how little you want to get involved: maybe you can bake a cake or sell some raffle tickets, or perhaps you feel inspired enough to organise an event. It is up to you.