Year 10 Enterprise Days

This week, all Year 10 students at Harrow Way Community School have had an opportunity to take part in two challenging enterprise days.

The first day was led by Angus Farmer, Managing Director of CocoMango, his specialist manufacturing company making hand-made soaps. Angus was making his third visit to the school following hugely successful events in the last two years. After learning about the basics needed to form a small business the students worked in teams to design their own soaps. This involved selecting from a wide range of essential oils and blending other ingredients to create a product appropriate to their target audience, then working to cost their proposals before generating effective advertising materials. When their proposals were complete, each group presented its product to a panel of judges in the semi finals, with three teams wining through to the final presentations. The overall winners were the “Bubbley Jubbley” company with their soap “Go for Gold”, ingeniously focusing on a 2012 Olympic theme. Angus takes the three winning recipes back to his factory, where he will make 50 bars of each soap that the students will later be able to sell, thereby completing their enterprise experience and bringing a sense of authenticity to their work. We hope the soaps will be ready in time for the school’s next Christmas Bazaar. Please keep a lookout for them on sale there!

The second Enterprise Day was based on recycling electronic equipment. Students worked with four representatives from SHP for Enterprise under their “Think Do” project to create and run their imaginary recycling companies. We have welcomed SHP to the school on several previous occasions and the event is always a great success. The 2012 event was no exception.

After a full introduction to the essential business concepts each “company” was given a set brief to follow, including assigning the necessary roles, decision making, marketing strategy, and finance. After working enthusiastically to set up their companies and to agree their corporate identities and unique selling points the groups then made presentations to demonstrate their companies to the whole year group. The SHP team worked with the groups at every stage to help them throughout the process, including developing marketing materials to help them ‘sell’ their chosen products.
The day allowed students to develop key enterprise skills including communication, time management and team work as well as building their confidence in making presentations. At the same time they were thinking about and understanding the importance of recycling electronic goods.

Mr Parsons, Deputy Headteacher, commented, “We have been delighted to have had this opportunity to work with our friends from SHP again this year. The students worked as enthusiastically as ever and responded well to each of the challenges they were set.” He emphasised the benefit to the students of participation in Enterprise Days, saying “Each year I find it is an impressive source of inspiration to see the innovative ideas the students come up with and it is a real pleasure to see them develop their skills, the level of cooperation and the teamwork which is evident when they proudly present their companies to their fellow students. Whenever I meet former students they recall events like these as being the ones that they remember most vividly about their school days.”

Many thanks to the team from SHP for making the day so successful and to Roger Buck from First Partnership, for their contribution to the successful organisation and running of both days.
There were individual prizes for Best Managing Director, best Finance Director, best Marketing Director and best I.T Director. The winning team overall created a company called “K-Eco”, winning an engraved trophy for their excellent presentation, which included an acted version of their company advertisement.

Please visit http://www.cocomango.co.uk for information about the CocoMango company, www.shpforenterprise.com for information about the work of SHP or the Think-Do project, and www.firstpartnership.com to view the work of First Partnership (our local Business and Education Partnership).