School fundraising group, do we need to be a charity

amandathepanda

We are a school fundraising group, doing all the usual school fundraising stuff, school fairs,discos, BBQS etc. We raise approx £5000 a year. Does anyone know if we are required to become a registered charity, we are having trouble finding out this information.

bushcaro

Check out the national pta website - loads of info
https://www.ncpta.org.uk

Werdnal

Also, have a look at the Charity Commission Website https://www.charity-commission.gov.uk.

Lesley

Savvy_Sue

... you don't have to register as a charity. There are some advantages to doing so, but equally some disadvantages, and I suspect that joining the NPTA mentioned above would give you both. I did school fundraising for many years without either going down the charity route or joining the NPTA.

What you are at the moment is a Not for Profit group, and that also gives you some advantages, like free banking from some banks. If you have your own bank account, best practice says you will have your accounts inspected each year, but if all your money goes through the school then I think it would be their problem.

Charity law is likely to change soon, btw, so it would be worth getting yourselves genned up on what's on the cards so you can work out whether to register quick - if that seems sensible! - or wait for a while!

baked_beans_lady

Savvy_Sue wrote:

... you don't have to register as a charity. There are some advantages to doing so, but equally some disadvantages, and I suspect that joining the NPTA mentioned above would give you both. I did school fundraising for many years without either going down the charity route or joining the NPTA.

Sorry, I have to disagree with you here Savvy Sue. I am a PTA member of our local primary school and I have been through the same situation recently. Our PTA has existed for many years but never registered as a charity. When I had our accounts examined by an indenpendent examiner (a friend of mine, who is a chartered accountant)last year, he raised this issue to our PTA. I checked on Charity Commission's website and also talked to someone in Charity Commission. Primary School PTA although is non-profit making organisation, but if your annual turnover is over £3000, by law you DO HAVE TO register as a charity, the only thing is that you don't have to submit annual account to the Charity Commission (but the Commission reserves the right to request PTA submit annual accounts when necessary).
PTA will need to submit an application along with its constitution to the Charity Commission. We submitted our documentation to them and had to amend some wordings, but everything was quite straight forward and the Charity Commission was very helpful too.

If your PTA does not have an existing constitution, you can find a sample document from the Charity Commission's website.

Hope this information help.

edit: by the way, if your PTA does not belong to the NPTA, then you should consider join, the annual membership including insurance is around £75. The public liability insurance will cover your any PTA fundraising events.

Savvy_Sue

baked_beans_lady wrote:

Sorry, I have to disagree with you here Savvy Sue. I am a PTA member of our local primary school and I have been through the same situation recently. Our PTA has existed for many years but never registered as a charity. When I had our accounts examined by an indenpendent examiner (a friend of mine, who is a chartered accountant)last year, he raised this issue to our PTA. I checked on Charity Commission's website and also talked to someone in Charity Commission. Primary School PTA although is non-profit making organisation, but if your annual turnover is over £3000, by law you DO HAVE TO register as a charity, the only thing is that you don't have to submit annual account to the Charity Commission (but the Commission reserves the right to request PTA submit annual accounts when necessary).
PTA will need to submit an application along with its constitution to the Charity Commission. We submitted our documentation to them and had to amend some wordings, but everything was quite straight forward and the Charity Commission was very helpful too.

If your PTA does not have an existing constitution, you can find a sample document from the Charity Commission's website.

Hope this information help.

edit: by the way, if your PTA does not belong to the NPTA, then you should consider join, the annual membership including insurance is around £75. The public liability insurance will cover your any PTA fundraising events.

Oh no problem being disagreed with! My remaining question would be whether joining NPTA would be sufficient to cover registering as a charity? In the same way as the Guides and Scouts are a national charity, and individual units do not have to register separately but get the benefits of charity registration? Seems surprising if that is not the case, but my active involvement in PTA fundraising is a while back.

I do agree with that insurance recommendation though: bouncy castles are so popular and so darned dangerous!!!