THESE children love playing in their quad, but at the moment when it rains they cannot use it.

Luckily for the pupils, Wheatley Primary School is one of five finalists in the Oxford Mail’s School Olympic Save Our Schools competition, and is hoping to win up to £7,500 of improvements.

For the second year, the Oxford Mail has teamed up with Abingdon-based construction company Leadbitter to offer one primary school a revamp, this time with a sports or Olympic-inspired theme.

Children at Wheatley Primary School have come up with a wishlist of improvements, including a changing hut for the school’s swimming pool, targets, bows and arrows, and javelins, a basketball hoop, and a balance beam.

They are also keen to have a running track and sandbox to practise long jump, high jump and triple jump.

But most importantly, they want a new brightly coloured weatherproof floor with games built into it, along with sails to keep the area dry when it rains and provide shelter from the sun.

PTA chairman Paula Hood, who has put together the application along with teacher Vicky Hopkins, said: “It would just be such a wonderful opportunity.

“It hasn’t been revamped in a very long time and it really is due some attention.”

She said it was difficult to raise money at the moment, and if the PTA did raise cash for the improvements, they would not be able to help out in other ways.

Mrs Hood said: “The children are really excited.

“They are all hoping they will come back in September and everything they have dreamed of is going to be there.”

The other finalists in our competition are Kingfisher School, Abingdon, New Marston in Oxford, Launton, and Edith Moorhouse in Carterton.

We will be profiling each of the school’s projects over the next three weeks, and printing special tokens alongside each story.

Schools are then challenged to collect as many tokens as they can until the end of the campaign. The tokens will be weighted according to the size of the school to ensure the contest is fair.

  • How to help:

You can support the school you’d most like to see get a makeover worth up to £7,500 by collecting the vouchers, which we are publishing in the Oxford Mail each day.

The school that collects the most vouchers will win the makeover courtesy of Abingdon-based Leadbitter Construction.

So, cut out the voucher on the right and get your friends and family involved in gathering them too.

We’ll be regularly publishing a leaderboard of the schools that have collected the most, so you can see how your favourite is getting on.

Please note that you will need to send the vouchers to the school of your choice so that they can be counted.

We’ll publish where to send them every Wednesday until the last voucher appears on Saturday, July 17.