News Entrepreneurial Events 08.11.2019
We’ve had a week of workshops, Q&As and whole school assemblies with the aim of inspiring girls to take risks, stand out from the crowd and tap into their entrepreneurial spirit.
On Tuesday, girls from Year 8 and 9 took part in separate half-day workshops to develop entrepreneurial skills. These sessions are just the beginning of a course for both year groups and they will now look to progress their ideas over the next few months in dedicated form time with the aim to present fully fledged ideas for their start-up in March at a final workshop. We have partnered with 7 billion ideas, a specialist in delivering entrepreneurial education in a school setting. Whilst branding is the focus for the Year 8 project, Year 9 got their teeth into creating a digital solution to a sustainable development issue.
It is going to be extremely exciting to monitor how these ideas develop over the coming months but, most importantly, this is going to give all of these girls the opportunity to be creative and adaptive in a structured setting. This venture very much fulfils the Gatsby benchmarks that are such a useful tool and measure in education.
On Thursday we also had the pleasure of welcoming the co-founder of Innocent Smoothies, Richard Reed, for a Q&A session and a special whole school assembly. Richard commented on Innocent’s humble beginnings as three friends from University who wanted to create something that ‘makes life easier and better for people’ and told the story of how they ate cereal for breakfast, lunch and dinner so they could buy £500 worth of fruit to make smoothies to sell at a local music festival – emphasising to girls the idea that ‘everything big starts small’.
In the Q&A session with budding entrepreneurs from Year 8, Richard stressed the need to put yourself out there, take risks and how the ‘joy of the entrepreneur is to keep turning a no into a yes’, and the girls had the opportunity to ask questions on their own business ideas, with many of them featuring renewable materials and environmentally-friendly methods of manufacture.