Kicking off our Year 6 Enterprise Project

Our Year 6 children are feeling very excited as they begin the planning for this term’s Enterprise Project, a key part of the Spring Term curriculum here at St Edward’s Prep. It gives our pupils the opportunity to try their hand at running their very own business. First the children brainstorm fun and catchy names for their company name and then work together to research and share ideas on what their product offering might look like and how it might fill a gap in the marketplace.

It’s always helpful at this planning stage to reach out to our community for help, ideas and expertise and we had the pleasure of Mrs Rhiannon Gibbs joining us yesterday who is also a parent here at the School. Mrs Gibbs is a Director of the wonderfully successful Ad Esse Consulting (www.ad-esse.com), a business improvement consultancy started in 2004 in order to help organisations change or transform to provide improvement to their customers in an ever changing world.

The children sat attentively listening to Mrs Gibbs and had interesting ideas to contribute around the topic of business, finance and planning. It was lovely hearing them offer their thoughts around what a public sector and private sector organisation might look like and how a not for profit organisation is run.

To help with the pupils’ planning they were then given a task to undertake a SWOT (strengths, weaknesses, opportunities and threats) analysis and really think about what their product offering might be and how it would stand up to the competition. Mrs Gibbs is as a real advocate for sharing knowledge to children at an early age around the joys of running your own business and the world of finance, so we really do appreciate Mrs Gibbs giving up her time for us.

Over the coming week, the children will put together their pitch for gaining the financial investment required to move on to the very exciting next stage in their projects – designing and manufacturing their products and getting out and about to our school community to sell as many of their innovative products as they can!

We wish them all the best of luck in pitching their ideas and securing that all important investment!