Enterprise award for Blakestown students

Seven months of hard work paid off for Blakestown Community School pupils recently when they were runners-up in the senior category of the annual Fingal Student Enterprise Awards and also scooped the prestigious Enterprising School Spirit Award.

The twelve fifth year Leaving Cert Applied students joined over three hundred parents, teachers and supporters who attended the awards ceremony in the Grand Hotel in Malahide. In addition to the award, the group also won a SMART Technologies Interactive Whiteboard, worth €6,500, for their school.

Since September, students have been setting-up and running their own enterprises as part of the programme. They have also had to prepare a business plan in advance, before setting up an exhibition display stand at the finals. They then had to face a grilling from a three-member judging panel, who jointly decided the winners.

The Blakestown students formed themselves into a company called “Connolly,” who last Autumn set about devising, researching, producing, marketing and, ultimately, selling a series of hand-crafted Easter cards. The project was naturally known as “Connolly Cards.”

“The group had to produce a viable business plan and a lot of hard work went into the project before the first card was ever produced,” explained teacher Frances Creighton. “Just as in business, each shareholder had to put in a certain stake into the company for initial capital – in this case €6 – in order to get the product off the drawing board and into the market place and they had to produce documentary evidence to show that all the best business practices were followed.

“As part of their marketing technique, six Easter hampers were produced for a raffle, with the help of local sponsorship, and this proved to be very valuable in injecting extra capital into the enterprise.”

The resulting Easter cards retailed at €3 each – or €4 for personalised cards – and produced sales well into three figures. Again, following correct business practices, tax will be levied on the profits in the form of a donation to an as yet undisclosed charity.

“This was the first time for Blakestown Community School to compete in the Fingal Student Enterprise Awards,” said Frances, “and to finish as runners up in the senior category and also to win the whiteboard is simply fantastic. The students are still on a high but they will have to re-live their experiences of this project for an external examiner as part of their LCA course.

“But the skills that they have developed with this project will be very useful to them in many other areas. As they evaluate what went well and what didn’t, they will realise that these skills can be applied to many different areas of their lives.”

Loreto Convent in Swords just shaded the top prize for their student enterprise, “Zero Tolerance,” which promoted awareness of the ‘size zero’ phenomenon through badges and key-rings, encouraging students to strive for a healthy body size.

“The aim is to encourage these young entrepreneurs to set up their own businesses in the future and judging from their business ideas, they clearly have the aptitude and ambition to achieve this,” commented Oisín Geoghegan, CEO of the Fingal County Enterprise Board.

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