Students get a taste for business

Students got a taste for business in an enterprise workshop challenge which involved creating a new chocolate box brand. See our photo gallery below

ENTERPRISING Ripon Grammar School students savoured the sweet smell of success when they were set the challenge of producing and marketing a new box of chocolates.

More than 120 Year 7 students - divided into teams, each with marketing, finance and design managers - all successfully created individually themed confectionary products with well thought through marketing plans, all within three hours.

Team Welcome to Paradise – Williams Lawns, Ethan Jackson, Handley Ord, Elijah Kitching, Joseph Goddard and James Burningham – were pronounced winners for their sustainable leaf shaped product, promoting the importance of tree-planting.

Students also had to prepare a presentation for the audience of 150 people, outlining everything from target consumers to profit levels and proposed advertising campaigns as part of the initiative, launched to help RGS students build skills for the future.

Judges from Harrogate and District Community Action and the North Yorkshire Business and Education Partnership said of the winners: “We loved their general all-round idea with its connection to the environment, the leaf-shaped box and their presentation, which was well thought out and planned. It was brilliant.”

RGS enterprise and work experience coordinator Bob Walker said it was a great opportunity for all the students to do something outside normal lessons: “Students use their creativity and problem-solving skills to work as a team and to a strict deadline to produce an interesting solution.

“In addition, they have to use their entrepreneurial skills to convince judges that their solution is the best one through their group presentation. The challenge seems so simple but, in reality, it is a really difficult one to achieve in three hours.”

*See our photo gallery featuring students at work, some of their products and runners-up teams, below. Mr Walker is pictured with the judges, Cheryl Owen and Poppy Halliday from NYBEP and Jo Thackwray of HDCA