A CHARITY for disabled children is set to launch a fundraising scheme to secure a new home and provide more services in the town.

Let’s Play Project – which offers youngsters aged between five and 18 a range of activities including cooking, days out and sports days – recently secured more than £280,000 in funding from Oxfordshire County Council so it can run for the next 19 months.

The group, which began in 2001 before becoming a registered charity in 2005, welcomes about 70 to 80 families every week to St Mary’s Primary School in Southam Road.

Recently about 30 children took part in a cooking event at the school.

Now project manager Deborah Kerrison, who praised the school for their support, said the group would be discussing ways to raise funds for a bigger base through grants, donations and events.

She said a bigger home would allow the charity to accommodate increasing demand, hold more cooking classes with the use of a bigger kitchen and even stretch the age limit beyond its current cut-off of 18.

The Didcot-based 53-year-old said: “A bigger place would mean we would be able to help more young people.”

Mrs Kerrison got involved in the charity in 2001 because her daughter Chloe Tyler had epilepsy, autism and learning difficulties.

She added: “Chloe had very challenging behaviour and it got to the point where she could not access mainstream activities and she was very isolated.

“As a parent it meant I was less isolated and I do not know how I would have managed without the project.”

Oxford Mail columnist and Let’s Play trustee Peter Unsworth said he got involved with the charity when he was at a Banbury job fair earlier this month and was taken aback by what he came across.

The 76-year-old, from Chipping Warden, added: “I was looking for something that might interest me and I liked what I saw.

“The kids are getting a shared interest with other children because, so often when youngsters have a problem, they are isolated.

“The people who are running it have had children there or still have children there and they keep it going.”

Oxfordshire County Council spokesman Owen Morton confirmed the £282,216 contract, awarded after a tendering process, would run from September 2015 to March 2017.