CHILDREN at Charlton-on-Otmoor Primary School are hoping to clean up if they win our Leadbitter School Build SOS competition. Literally.

The Fencott Road school is one of the six shortlisted for this year’s competition to win £7,500 worth of building work.

Teachers and pupils are planning to turn an old classroom into changing rooms and a storage room for outdoor education.

And they are appealing to you to help them by collecting tokens published in the Oxford Mail over the next two weeks.

Headteacher Mike Wisbach said: “We have been trying to improve our outdoor education over the past couple of years and we have a regular afternoon where the children do gardening.

“The project is to create a boys’ changing room, a girls’ changing room and somewhere we can keep the equipment so we don’t make a mess in the school every time we come in.

“At the moment all our gardening equipment is just sat out on a veranda and things have gone missing in the past.

“The children are keen to get this. They always hear about how much cleaning our caretaker has to do.”

This is the fourth year that Abingdon-based Leadbitter, which built the training grounds for the 2012 Olympics, has teamed up with the Oxford Mail to offer the prize.

Leadbitter operations director Ian Batchelor said: “When we saw the amount of hard work which had obviously gone into this submission we were genuinely impressed.

“The teachers and children had given the project a great deal of time and thought.”

Schools have until Tuesday, July 17, to collect as many tokens as they can. The number will be weighted against the number of pupils at each school to give every school a fair chance of winning the prize.

The work will be carried out over the summer holidays.

Tomorrow we will focus on West Kidlington Primary’s plan for an indoor/outdoor museum.