Year 12 Business Enterprise Trip

This year we were lucky to be able to take two teams consisting of 12 Year 9 and three Year 12 pupils to the BT Business Enterprise Day at Adastral Park, Martlesham. The day is a highly realistic business simulation in which pupils form and run a company entirely on their own. They compete against each other and against other schools.

Their company goal was to manufacture and sell cars with the aim of being the team that makes the most money by the end of the day. To be successful, they needed to be organised and ensure that the right individuals were in the right role.

The CEO must provide vision and direction, finance need to manage the cashflow, the commodities brokers need to successfully trade for raw resources to manufacture into car parts and marketing’s role is to gain visibility for their product in the marketplace. The whole team needed to work together efficiently and react quickly to overcome all the challenges.

Our two teams, CNX and ChinWag, had worked well in enrichments the preceding week. They used the extensive pack that the BT staff had provided to plan and prepare for the event. They were also fortunate to have the support from the members of last year’s team to assist in the preparation sessions.

At the event, there was good teamwork with many pupils standing out as leaders and others proving themselves as effective supporting team members. They all enjoyed the day, and skills were gained and nurtured such as public speaking, negotiation, finance, security, leadership, marketing and PR.

Mrs Williamson’s support as Head of Business Studies and Economics was again invaluable. Mistakes were made and lessons learnt within a safe environment and both teams ended the day successfully in the top ten companies.

Three Year 12 students were invaluable in their support to the BT Team with two of them working hard in the parts department and the other student supporting the IT team to ensure that the digital screens were kept up to date through the event.

Well done to all who took part!