Mrs Garner (Business and Economics Teacher)

In February and March this year the Year 8 students took part in The Tenner Challenge which is run by the Young Enterprise organisation. The Year 12 students from the Business and Economics Society also got involved and provided support to each form. The theme of this year’s challenge was to develop a product which recycled or up-cycled an existing product that the students had access to; there were some great ideas of ways to reuse old face masks, old hair scrunchies, old nail varnish and old water bottles. The teams were asked to only use £10 to set up their business, this would then help them to come up with creative ways of finding or making their product without just buying their products.  The goal was to make a profit which would then be donated to the school charity.

Well I think that we can safely say that the students surpassed all of our expectations – they generated £605 in profit (revenue minus costs). Initially we had intended on sending the profits to one of our school charities, The Bedford’s Women’s Centre, but the government is matching our donations to United World Schools (UWS) at the moment, so we felt that this was an opportunity to make our donation go further and still help a great cause. UWS is currently running the Girls Will Be Girls campaign aiming to help over 10,000 girls from remote and marginalised communities across Cambodia, Nepal, Myanmar and Madagascar to get a life-changing education. The money raised by this year 8 group will go a long way to helping this aim become a reality.

Miss Davies, the form tutor for 8KKD said: “The Tenner Challenge has been a great motivator for 8KKD. They have demonstrated teamwork, creativity and resourcefulness to create their fantastic business ideas. Together they worked hard and saw their efforts realised both on the day, but also with a spontaneous pop-up fair the following day of their own design. We are very proud of their commitment to the Challenge!”

Holly Stuart in 8KKD said: “I really enjoyed participating in the Tenner Challenge, as it was great to be able to work together to create something we could be proud of, in a creative way. It was really exciting to be able to experience what it could be like to run a small business, and see how much effort, time, money, and resources it takes to just set it up. I really liked putting together this project in our team for the Juniors, ours being called Beadazzled, and being able to work up to showing and selling all that we had made by hand! I hope that we do something like this again!”

Seren Morgan, also from 8KKD said: “In the tenner challenge we learned a lot of new skills and to work together and we had to compromise to make sure everyone’s ideas got heard. We had to learn how to be open to different ideas as we changed our ideas to make sure that we had enough money for what we needed to buy. We had a great time doing the tenner challenge and learnt a lot from the experience!”

We judged two aspects of the final competition – the team who generated the most profit and the team who had the best stand in the marketplace. The winners will be announced in the Year 8 Assembly on Tuesday 10th May. Everyone did an amazing job and really caught the entrepreneurial bug. We look forward to seeing them all on Dragon’s Den! Thank you to all the form tutors who supported this activity and to the Year 12 students who mentored the teams.