THE STUDENT
THE COMPETITION JUDGE
Partnerships
Prepare to be
MATCH READY!
O
ver the years, I’ve found that one of the inevitable, but frustrating, sides of successfully setting up
a business partnership scheme is that everyone thinks you have a bottomless source of funding to draw on. These days, I can easily sniff out a colleague who is after some money, immediately be resolved, by the way they sidle up to me saying, ‘So, Sam, we have an interesting project coming up and wondered if any of the business partners would like to be involved?’! In some respects, it’s a strong
endorsement of the way our partnership programme has become an integral part of school life, but it also shows a rather naïve understanding of the way that such relationships work. It’s colleagues who have great ideas for improving pupils’ learning experiences that engaging business support isn’t a tap we can turn on at will. It’s more like trying to gently extract little nuggets of gold from a large piece of rock!
What do you want? This year, we’ve attempted to take a different approach in order to eliminate these ad hoc requests and their associated frustrations. At the
beginning of term, we put out a request for projects that departments knew were coming up during the year, or projects that staff had in the back of their minds that just needed the right catalyst to come to fruition. We designed a short brief and then
Business partners can contribute time, skills and manpower to make exciting projects happen – the trick is to pin down your projects with time to find the right partner – as Sam Baker explains
sent out a one-sided template to complete, rather like a mini business plan, detailing who the project was aimed at, how it would enhance the learning experience of the students involved, along with the requirement resources. The key to the brief was that the projects should involve an experience that the students wouldn’t normally have in the daily curriculum or one that department budgets wouldn’t usually cover. The hope was that it moved staff
away from the utilitarian goals of, say, improving engagement in maths among Year 9 boys, to something that made education stimulating and uplifting for everyone involved. On a practical level, there was also the hope that it would encourage more involvement from business partners if it was something exciting.
Build momentum We had a varied and interesting set of responses. The food technology team wanted to set up a cookery competition like MasterChef or The Great British Bake Off (with business partners as judges); the dance department wanted to raise money could use not only for their excellent after-school dance clubs, but also for their outreach programmes to feeder schools; the G&T team wanted funding for a fascinating academic programme called The Brilliant Club, supported by the PhD community; the learning support team were after more equipment for the school garden; the pastoral support team had a raft of ideas around mental health, especially with regard to relieving stress during exam seasons; and the careers coordinator wanted to resurrect ‘enterprise days’.
responses returned in advance of the school year is that we have time to build up momentum, and gather support from a range of sources, by advertising them as our highlighted
FundEd SPRING 2018 41
IMAGES: TOPVECTORS; PIXAROMA/
THINKSTOCK.CO.UK
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