GETTING children excited about toilets is not necessarily the easiest thing to do.

But that has been the job for staff at Mill Lane Primary School, in Chinnor, as they enter the last stretch of a bid to win £7,500 of improvements to rebuild their toilet block.

For the fourth year running, the Oxford Mail has teamed up with Abingdon-based construction company Leadbitter to offer one school a revamp worth £7,500 in the Leadbitter School Build SOS competition.

Today we print the last token while looking again at Mill Lane Primary School’s proposals.

School secretary Jenny Dunse said: “The wider community has been fantastic.

“Our governors are buying the paper and the local shop has been giving me 50 papers to sell a day.

“Our nearby schools have been collecting tokens as well, and so has the shop and our staff and parents are going out and buying them as well.”

She admitted the project probably did not sound the most glamorous, but said it would make a huge difference to children.

She said: “For the foreseeable future, Key Stage 2 classes are having to use those toilets all the time.

“As children are becoming more mature earlier, we also need somewhere for them to change. It will make a phenomenal difference.

“I know lots of children are quite scared of going to the toilet but you can get some lovely, colourful doors with pictures now, which are really child friendly.

“One child said ‘you can live without lots of things but not without toilets’.”

The school had put refurbishing the toilet block on hold because of the possibility of getting new buildings but when funding was frozen, it left the children stuck with the existing loos.

And even if the school does eventually get funding released for a larger building, the plan would be to keep the outdoor block to offer more facilities, particularly when events are being held outside.

For the past two weeks we have been looking at the six shortlisted projects and printing tokens alongside each story.

Now it is down to supporters to get all the tokens to their chosen school by tomorrow to be in with a chance of winning.

To ensure the contest is fair, they will be mathematically weighted according to the size of the school.

The winners will be announced this week and the work will be carried out at the winning school during the summer holidays, to be ready for the new school year.