That figure comes from Parentkind (opens in a new tab), whose member PTAs number more than 12,500. Roughly £10,000 a school.
I've been a PTA treasurer for three years, and what I love about that number is how it's built. Not in one go, and not from a grant.
It's £150 at a time, selling ice lollies in the playground on a Friday afternoon. It's £2,500 from carols with the band and a Santa's grotto in December. It's £3,000 from a summer fair that took four months to plan and one very long Friday to run. Raffle tickets, cake stalls, second hand uniform sales, a float counted out at half seven in the morning by someone who has to be at work by nine.
Every single pound of that £120 million was fought for by somebody who volunteered to fight for it.
It's a proper army
Parents, grandparents, aunts, uncles, carers, teachers who give up a Friday evening, the person who says yes to storing three hundred ice lollies in their own freezer. Tens of thousands of people, in every town in the country, most of whom have never met each other, and all of whom are doing the same thing at roughly the same time of year.
But here's the part I'd most like people to see. It isn't really about the money.
What the money actually buys
It's the panto every December. It's the Easter eggs. It's the class gift at Christmas. It's the book the head teacher hands over when a child has finished a hundred reads at home. It's the laptops. It's the pirate ship in the playground. It's the canopy that means a class can still get outside when it's boiling hot and shade is needed.
Ask a grown adult what they remember about primary school and it's almost never the curriculum. It's the trip, the fair, the panto, the year Santa turned up. A lot of those memories exist because a handful of parents ran a cake sale or a frozen Friday.
That's what £120 million buys. Childhoods that were a bit better than they would otherwise have been.
So to everyone who has ever counted a float, chased a raffle prize, stood in a playground in the rain during a sponsored bunny hop, or said yes when they were already busy: thank you.
You've built something genuinely enormous, one bake sale at a time, and it deserves a great deal more light than it gets.