Inspiring Young Minds
The Bedgebury Foundation makes awards to state-funded schools or charities working in schools in Kent and East Sussex. We provide full or partial grants for projects that benefit specific cohorts and/or whole school learning, wellbeing and mental health.
Funding Theme
This year our theme is inclusion. Grants of up to £6,000 per school are available for programmes that promote inclusion and remove barriers to learning. Projects should support pupils who face disadvantage or exclusion – whether through special educational needs, disability, financial hardship, language barriers, or other challenges – to access and thrive in education.
Examples of projects that we are interested in funding include:
- activities and interventions for children who are experiencing barriers to learning (such as forest school/horticulture projects, speech and language interventions, cooking sessions, arts activities). These activities could be run by existing school staff or by an external agency.
- programmes or activities for parents that enable them to work with their children to help them to re-engage in learning.
- professional support from experts who can introduce new strategies into the school to help encourage inclusion.
Funding can cover:
- facilitator/professional fees.
- training (but if your proposal is primarily for training you are more likely to be successful by applying to the Teacher & Training programme)
- equipment (but equipment can only form 25% of your total request eg. If you are applying for a cooking programme that has a total cost of £2,000 only £500 of that can go towards equipment to support the programme).
- Subscription costs/software licences.
We are not able to fund:
- sensory rooms or nurture spaces
- cover for school staff
- Charities/CICs or schools that received a grant in the last academic year
The Bedgebury Foundation is unlikely to support applications which are unrelated to a specific need, which form part of the National Curriculum, are a replacement of statutory obligations or easily funded elsewhere.
We would prefer our funding to cover all or most of the costs of a project.
“It’s amazing that by map tracking data, we can give each student a numeracy age to monitor their progress” – Teacher
“I love the Sensory Room, it makes me feel really calm and happy” – Year 3 child
News
Free Dyslexia training in association with British Dyslexia Association. In November, we are offering two half day training sessions for staff in Kent and East Sussex schools, for more information click here
Teaching and Training Programme: is now open and will close on October 26th 2026.
Inspiring Young Minds: is now closed and will reopen in December 2026.
We will communicate decisions for Teaching and Training applications in December.
By pressing apply now you may set up an account and complete an application form for any open programme.