A charity-run nursery and complex needs school will be stocking up on thousands of pounds worth of free books as the winners of our Books for Schools competition are announced.
In October we launched a region wide campaign to encourage staff, parents and communities to collect tokens to be in with a chance of winning free books for their local school.
Hundreds of schools around the region entered and after months of collecting, the four schools with the most tokens - worked out on a pro rata basis on pupil numbers - have been revealed.
The Earthsea School in Honingham won first prize, with the Ladybird pre School Nursery in Sheringham following hot on its heels in second place.
Third and fourth place went to Hickling Infant School and Saxlingham Primary, with all four top placing schools winning £2,500 of free books each.
More than 250 other schools which collected more than 1,000 tokens will receive £100 worth of free books, benefitting more than 50,000 pupils around Norfolk.
The Earthsea School, part of the Short Stay School for Norfolk, educates children who have complex needs.
Clare Stimpson, admin officer at the school, said she was thankful to the local community for their continued help and support.
She said: 'The children and teachers are currently in the process of choosing these books which will enhance the learning of the children and give them a greater choice.'
In Sheringham, Ladybird nursery manager Vanessa Harris said the school was delighted with its second place win.
She said: 'We have decided to give every child at the nursery a book as a gift to help promote reading at home. For a small charity pre-school such as we are this is a huge deal and will allow us to purchase a much wider variety of books than we would be able to.'
Mrs Harris said the school planned to spend the remainder of the money buying multiple copies of traditional favourites so that early readers could follow along in group reading sessions.
In total 909,467 tokens were collected in Norfolk.
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