An award-winning scheme to help school pupils in Bradford lead healthy lives could be forced to fold next year because of a lack of funding.

The project, which has just won a prestigious Excellence in Cities award, desperately needs to find another £80,000 to keep up its work across the district.

To help secure its survival, the charity which has been run in Bradford and Keighley for the past 15 years, has just appointed a fundraising officer.

The warning that Bradford's Life Education Centre's own lifespan could be cut short came from one of its educators Helen Johnson who tours round primary schools across the district with one of the project's four mobile classrooms.

Mrs Johnson said it would be "a disaster" if the project failed to find new financial backers.

Life Education Centres is a national charity which aims to promote healthy living among school children. Its work in Bradford has been funded locally from various fund-giving organisations including the Children's Fund and Excellence In Cities - schools are also asked to pay an amount per child to cover the costs.

Mrs Johnson, whose work encouraging parents to come into schools for drug and health awareness classes won an Excellence In Cities award, said: "What we need to do is find more sources of funds to develop our work and grow bigger.

"What we want is sustained funding - ideally we should be getting more money from the Government's health and education departments because of the issues we are promoting. Technically if we can't find funding then we could close next year and that would be a disaster."

David Henderson, the project's technical director and trustee, said: "We are hitting the point that schools are starting to say it's getting too expensive to use the classrooms but they know how essential we are. We need more sustained funding to pay the rest of the costs for maintenance, towing the classrooms round and insurance - that amounts to another £80,000 a year."

The project's newest classroom had its first outing last week to Queensbury's Shibden Head Primary School.

Deputy headteacher there Theresa Berry said: "It's a fabulous resource and is something that needs to be maintained for the sake of Bradford children to help them learn about their own health and safety."

Anyone interested in helping the scheme should contact fundraiser Richard Hughes-Rowland on (01943) 872903.