In Birmingham in the United Kingdom, students aged 18 are trusted to run a social enterprise for one year. The main selling point of the business is educational classes on Saturday mornings that are targeted at children aged 8-10 years old. The classes are planned to be fun whilst teaching the paying customers (young children) knowledge in an engaging way. Each class that is taught on a Saturday morning is entirely created by 18-year-olds and taught by the same students, moving responsibility away from adult teachers to younger pupils, providing the 18-year-old students with a huge sense of responsibility.
By empowering the younger generation in this way, it enables young people to make a difference through assuming leadership roles and thereby equipping them with the qualities, experiences, attitudes, and skills for them to become more confident, resilient, active in their community and employable.
The internal business model is in the form of a hierarchy, with one person being elected as Head each year. This one person (who is 18 years old) has the power and free role to choose his/her working team. In recent years, the head has decided to choose two deputies who will help the head with the weekly activities and oversee the running of the social enterprise. Within the system, a training programme is created to ensure that the 17 and 18-year-olds who teach on Saturday mornings have the required skills to be effective in their job. It is key that the classes that are delivered on Saturday mornings are to a high standard to ensure that the paying customers will return, hence keeping the business in profit.
To ensure that the young teachers on Saturday mornings are able to teach the sessions with confidence, a training programme was developed, with each training session focusing on QEAS. This acronym stands for the Quality, experiences, attitude, and skills. The sessions focus on practical learning and this is reinforced by deploying the learning in real life situations.
The impact of the programme is considerable. After completing the programme, 125 students have been surveyed – 84% reported that they had taken on responsibilities to help deliver a project via the leadership programme, 97% stated that they had gained by helping to deliver a project, with the significant gains been made in confidence (87%), leadership (82%), communication skills (94%) and decision-making skills (79%). Overall, 86% of the students said that they have shown new and/or improved skills through delivering projects and activities and 68% felt that the school in general and they as an individual are more integrated into the community because of delivering projects to the community.
