27/06/2024
📣 With a heavy heart we would like to announce to the wider community that our playgroup will close the door for good tomorrow.
Our parents are aware and they all with sadness but also understanding signed to agreed to the “Propsal to a voluntary agreement of the members to dissolve the group” made at the beginning of June.
We have been communicating our concerns regarding raising costs to run the group with the Centre and council officers on the number of occasions over the last year, as our attempts to secure relevant funding has been unsuccessful.
The significant rise of rent and no new funding for running costs, combined with numbers of children lower than needed to cover minimum staff wages pushed the group to spend reserves because our incoming resources were not enough to meet the charity commitments.
Furthermore, almost all of our current children are walking away to either full time nursery or primary school after summer holiday and there is a very low response from the waiting list we have.
After consultation with the independent accountant office and consideration of all circumstances, it was agreed that the charity will not be able to continue to operate after summer holiday.
To prevent insolvency and further complication we came to a voluntary agreement to close the Craigentinny Castle Playgroup and appropriate applications to our overlooking bodies are already in place.
We understand that this is a sad news for some of the community members as well as for ourselves and would like to thank everyone for their support and kind words. We tried to keep this group running for as long as we could and we are grateful for being part of this community.
We want to reassure everyone that we are in the close contact with the council and other groups at the moment to make sure that those couple of children who would have stayed in the group will have a childcare available after summer break.
With the best wishes
Craigentinny Castle Playgroup ❤️
