PTA raffle-all 4 of the Chair’s kids won the top prizes

Same!

Our PTA has a joint bank account. One signatory is the chair or treasurer of the PTA and the other is the HT or DHT.

It is dishonest @EstherOnions I agree, and especially mean if kids are involved hoping to have a chance to win a decent prize.

Tombola's are usually easy to do.
My PTA always did a Bottle Tombola and people just needed to donate a bottle of something (wine, bubble bath, bottle of squash, tomato sauce etc).
Cheap to donate so we always got loads.
We usually had a few "booby prizes" like a bottle of plain water but mostly the prizes were equal-ish.
It was a really profitable stall.
Personally I would have preferred it to be fully non-alcoholic because it was a primary school and the children obviously weren't allowed to take the alcohol if they won.

I would also raise issues about the chair and the treasurer being married to each other. Usually if you have a bank account for a PTA or other voluntary organisation it requires double authorisation on payments to prevent one person clearing the bank account - that is clearly an issue when the two people with access to banking and to countersign cheques are married to each other.

Not all PTAs are registered charities - ours wasn't - but there were still rules about getting accounts audited and available for inspection by anyone who asked.

I really think you should - this is awful. Also shouldn’t there be some sort of separation of duties? Sadly people defraud charities.

I think I might try and find out properly because with People's Fundraising you don't get paper tickets and it's autodraw.

If I was either of the parents I’d have put the prizes back in the raffle after the first win, I did this myself when I won two prizes in our local pub raffle.

Surely a raffle draw has to be made in public?

Obvious fix! So blatant that it's comical!

Bloody hell. I didn’t realise the PTA took tombolas so seriously.
I don’t remember even having a tombola at our school. Maybe at one of the end of term fetes.

They cheated.

Raffles like these are always drawn in front of the audience and the winners come up to claim their prize.

Very embarrassing for them to be this grabby.

Why won’t you say anything? There’s a clear conflict of interest and PTAs are registered charities, you absolutely should be raising this.

There’s a lot of money passing through them and if you have suspicions you should raise it, ask to see the charity accounts.

If it’s an online system to purchase tickets then the same system can do the draw. Our school pta uses it to avoid accusations of this nature because as someone else said upthread, pta members sometimes win more because they buy more tickets.

There are lots of automated ticket sites that also do the draw, it wouldn’t take much research to see if your school is using one.

As I stated in my opening sentence, this wasn’t the worst I’ve seen - that involved legal action being brought in to force a different chair to step down over multiple, serious acts of corruption.
But “not unusual” doesn’t make something acceptable. Normalising it just makes it worse. These are people supporting their community in good faith - and deliberately rigging things to squeeze more money out of them is plainly dishonest. If you genuinely think that’s acceptable, then I think you need to give your moral compass a good, hard tap.

There was a girl in our class who ALWAYS won the raffle because everyone else's parents gave them 50p or whatever for one ticket, and her dad would hand over 50 quid, because he's a kind soul (genuinely, you won't find anyone with a bad word to say about him) and it was for charity. It never occurred to him that his generosity would be viewed poorly, and his daughter used it to buy herself a 'win' pretty much every time. Not a deliberate fix, just ended up that way, unfortunately.

Yes it sounds like they might be. We did a raffle at the school I worked in and sold the tickets in advance. We had to apply for a licence from the council. The tickets should state the name and address of the organiser (ours was the headteacher). And the date of the draw.

If the tickets are sold and drawn on the same day they don’t need a licence, they would probably use those books of cloakroom tickets.

Not all schools fix it and none should!

We did once have rather enthusiastic young raffle ticket sellers who managed to sell both halves of some of the tickets. Luckily, all the tickets had been sold on the night, so the buyers were still there. Before the draw, an announcement was made explaining the mistake and asking the holders of certain ticket numbers to bring their tickets to be replaced.

If the mistake had been left uncorrected, it could have been a very profitable raffle, but it wouldn’t have been right, as some tickets had zero chance of winning!

I’d definitely want to speak to the Head about this. I think I’d say that even if nothing untoward is going on, it looks incredibly suspicious. I’d ask the Head if they can arrange a public raffle draw in future as this should protect the school and the PTA from allegations of fraud.

Our primary PTFA draw it on a “live” video, but every time I’ve tried to watch it live, there’s been a “glitch” or an issue or something that means it’s not able to be posted until a day later. Funnily enough it’s the PTFA ladies drawing a ticket, it cuts to the hamper/gift box prize and then they read out the name.
Every year we have put in for tickets. We won once - when I was out of work and volunteered to help the PTFA, made signs for the Christmas fayre, supervised the disco, went to all the meetings etc.
The second I stopped volunteering, the woman who stepped into my “slot” started winning the same hamper we had won the first year.
I think they all fix it!

Legally they are actually breaking the law!

School PTAs are usually registered charities. You could always report them to the Charities Commission.

It sounds likely to be a fix. They could have shortened their odds by buying significantly more tickets than the general population, but even then it would be very lucky for all four to come in. Of course, you'd need to know the numbers to calculate the statistical probability.

So you think the school staff are all in on this too? And have given it the thumbs up?

How do you know so much about everyone's movements? Were you sat opposite school watching?

I was chair of the pta for years. It was the most soul sucking, thankless and stressful task. You absolutely cannot do right for doing wrong with everyone (in my case also with the school as much as the parents, your partner and your own dc). The accusations of clique behaviour when there are only the same 3 parents spending hours building the school wildlife area/setting up and clearing up the fete or painting the bloody fence does mean you are friendly with them, yes.

My child won 2 big prizes at different school fayre. Both times another parent had to kindly taken them round the stalls because I, as usual, couldn't, due to manning the bbq or similar. On both occasions I only found out they had entered the 'guess the weight of the cake' 'guess the jelly beans in the jar' type things, when they were presented with their winnings.

My name also very very often came out on the 100 club prizes because I sold about 75% of the numbers to my friends/family/neighbours. I have won many a raffle (rancid dusty wine) because I buy so many flipping tickets. I won a 'colour hamper' that was made up in large part of stuff I sent in!

Who knows what is going on in your situation- it sounds mad/made up. But don't use it as a vehicle to encourage others to pick holes in pta endeavours.

Everyone wonders why more people don't help. Maybe because they don't want to he the 'most slagged off' by all the other parents?

We used to have a similar thing, chocolate bingo at our primary school, with a raffle. One year our family won at least 3 or 4 prizes, it was so embarrassing I was going to give one back! And the kids were like no way mum, we can eat it.