GEW High Impact Award
As part of GEW we went up to Kingsmeadow School, Gateshead, to deliver a smoothie enterprise challenge to the budding Year 8 Entrepreneurs. The event has won a ‘High Impact Award’ from Global Entrepreneurship Week.
The Enterprise day gives pupils skills and competences which are required when trying to create and promote a brand new product and bring it to market. In addition, it gives pupils opportunities to work with people they may not normally work with at school, in a business context.
The day was set up in stages where pupils first had to organise themselves into teams, and within that form their own company structure with an MD, marketing team, finance team and even HR to resolve any team issues.
They were set a number of tasks which they needed to complete within strict time deadlines.
Like any business they had to work together using each other’s strengths and overcoming any weaknesses or problems to the challenges they faced during the day.
Each company had to consider carefully who they were attempting to target their products at and reflect on all aspects of the marketing mix.
The day culminated with presentations from each company on the products they had created in a ‘dragons den’ style format. Each team were toughly scrutinised, to ensure, that each task set during the day had been applied, to create a viable final product. Each company also had an advert story board to create an advert for their new smoothie product to appeal to their chosen market.
The day was a fantastic success and more importantly great fun. The pupils were enthusiastic, enterprising and very brave in delivering their presentations and adverts to a mass of people.
Miss Duncan business studies teacher at Kingsmeadow commented;
“Our Year 8 students really enjoyed the Xing enterprise event that they took part in during Global Entrepreneurship Week. Not only did they make their own smoothies and learn all about business and healthy eating, but they really did develop their entrepreneurial skills – working as a cohesive team, thinking through problems, taking risks and presenting their work to the rest of the group. Excellent.”
A year 8 student from company ‘Smoothie Sensation’ commented;
“We had a fantastic day learning all about business, developing our team working skills and even making our own smoothies.”
We are really proud to have been recognised as having delivered a high impact event from the GEW team and hope to continue this work in other schools. Thanks to all at Kingsmeadow for having us.
Phil Benson