St Ninian’s Lower School year eight students were awarded with prizes for coming up with some bright ideas as part of a project to learn about business. The Manx Telecom Core Skills Enterprise Challenge is for students aged 12 and 13 who work in groups of five or six pupils for a 10 week period. Each term during the 2015/2016 school year, all of the year eight pupils will get to participate in the project which is run as part of the ‘core skills’ section of the curriculum. The challenge is for pupils to come up with either a business idea, or a project which has a social benefit. For business ideas, students can be given a small amount of money as ‘seed’ capital to get their idea off the ground – and this funding has been provided by Manx Telecom as part of their sponsorship. Some of the funds are also used for prizes to reward teams for their efforts.

At the end of each term the teams involved face a judging panel to explain their ideas and how they would put them into practice. This term’s winning teams were each awarded ?40 from Manx Telecom at an assembly on March 2. The ‘Star Walkers’ team won for their idea to ‘wear something crazy in tutorial’ to raise money for the MSPCA; ‘Infinity Blu’ for selling mobile phone accessories; and ‘Top Notch’ for their idea to place hand sanitizers around St Ninian’s Lower School. Representatives of second place teams ‘Pucca-Dea’, ‘Team Hero’ and ‘Mapped’ each won ?20 for their groups.

The Enterprise Challenge is being organised by St Ninian’s teachers Tony Roberts (Subject Leader for Business Education) and Stephen Edwards (Core Skills Co-ordinator).

Photo -  ‘Infinity Blu’ team members are presented with their prize by teachers Matt Harvey, far left, and Stephen Edwards, far right, and Marg McGee, Manx Telecom Marketing Executive.