THE popular Schools – Collect For Cash challenge is returning to the Examiner this autumn, but schools need to act quick and sign up now.

Schools throughout our circulation area will have the chance to grab a slice of £10,000 – but they must register with us before they break up for summer.

Last year the Huddersfield Daily Examiner’s Schools – Collect for Cash promotion gave away £10,000 in cash to local schools to spend on whatever they needed – and the same amount is on offer again this year.

The main winners included six-year-old visually-impaired Lindley C of E Infants School pupil Freya Shaw.

She had to use binoculars before the school bought the Magnalink CCTV from money won through Collect For Cash.

The state-of-the art piece of kit now helps her see friends and the school environment more clearly.

Children at Slaithwaite Junior And Infants School won £2,000 to develop their allotments and learn about healthy lifestyles.

Kirkburton Middle school spent its £2,000 on improving its outdoor games – including a giant chess set – and Holmfirth High won £2,000 to improve its resource centre with new CD-ROMs and reference books.

There were four runners-up and each won £500.

This year, the Huddersfield Daily Examiner has teamed up with Barclays bank to offer schools the chance to win a share of another £10,000.

Joining forces with the Examiner to run the competition, is just the latest in a long list of projects the bank carries out to support the local community.

Huddersfield area branch manager Gayle Young said: “Barclays Community Programme aims to make a real and lasting difference to the communities where we live and work.

“We’re really proud of our leading community investment programme which added up to more than £50m in 2007. Barclays has a well-established global community programme called Banking on Brighter Futures.”

Gayle said that in the UK the company focuses the majority of its funding into projects which help young people make sensible decisions about money and plan their finances for the future – as well as a host of community projects.

She said: ‘Last year more than 43,000 of our people were involved in fundraising or volunteering in their communities and we supported more than 7,000 charities around the world. Wherever we are, our staff are always part of the local community.

“Over the last five years Barclays people have raised more than £60m for their favourite charities with our help through matched fundraising.”

Schools in the Examiner’s circulation area who want to be in with a chance of winning some of the cash should take the following steps.

All will receive a large envelope with a huge rainbow on the front with entry forms inside. Simply fill the form in and send it back to us – or register online.

Then, from mid September, get parents, students and supporters to collect ‘cash’ tokens printed in the Examiner.

Readers will be encouraged to collect as many tokens as possible for their chosen school over five weeks.

The way the cash will be distributed has changed this year.

Instead of giving £2,000 to four different age section winners along with four smaller prizes of £500, we are going to give the money in descending order to the schools who collect the most tokens in relation to the size of the school.

The winners will be those schools who collect the most tokens per pupil. So, if you have 100 pupils in your school and you collect 2,000 tokens, your token-collect average will be 20.

You would beat a far bigger school that had collected 4,000 tokens and had 600 pupils as their average which would only be 6.66 tokens per pupil.

The £10,000 will be split into five separate amounts: 1st prize = £3,000; 2nd prize = £2,500; 3rd prize = £2,000; 4th prize = £1,500; 5th prize = £1,000.