THE team behind the £250,000 sensory pool bid for Sandgate School are hoping their appeal will "spread like wildfire" when it goes live a week from today.

The official launch of the Make a Splash for Cash fundraiser will see videos posted on social media of children, parents and teachers from the Kendal special school getting wet on Windermere's lake shore.

The clips will be posted on Facebook, Twitter and Instagram with a challenge to others to make a splash too - whether that be jumping in a lake, the sea or a puddle, or dipping the wheels of their wheelchair in water.

The hope is the appeal will "snowball" like the charity Ice Bucket Challenge that famously went viral on social media - spreading its reach beyond Kendal across the country, and even around the world.

Each video clip uploaded will feature a link to where money can be donated.

At the school, excitement is building ahead of next week's launch using "Thunderclap" - a way of helping grass-roots campaigns to spread a message by attracting thousands of tweets and shares on social media.

As head teacher Dan Hinton told the Gazette, everyone at Sandgate is passionate about the benefits of a sensory pool for children and young people with complex learning needs and disabilities.

He wants the pool to set "a gold standard" for Cumbria by meeting "the real need to do something different" for pupils such as Connie Elson, ten, who cannot talk or walk.

"It's a chance to do something to help young people who desperately need it," said the head teacher.

If the £250,000 appeal is successful, the new pool will be built at the school's Queen Katherine School site, as part of a £5 million expansion to increase Sandgate's capacity to 120 students, aged three to 19.

The pool would offer an immersive sensory experience, with warm, soothing water to ease aches, pains and rigid limbs, enhanced by coloured light projections, evocative smells, sounds and music to help awaken all the senses and bring curriculum topics alive in meaningful ways.

A pool-based lesson on volcanoes, for example, would see "lights go red, the rumble of bass from the speakers, Connie hoisted over the top of the swimming pool and slowly lowered into this bubbling mass of water".

The geography of the seaside, meanwhile, could be conjured up with the sound of seagulls and the tang of salt in the air.

"That's Connie's understanding of the world around her," said Mr Hinton.

"It's a totally different experience from being in a wheelchair. It frees pupils from the confines of gravity."

The Make a Splash for Cash appeal is set to go live on Thursday (July 18) when full details of how you can take part will appear on Sandgate's website at www.sandgateschool.org.uk