Enterprise

With over 15% of the UK population being entrepreneurs (4.5 million people!), we at Surbiton High School believe that it’s our responsibility to encourage our students to unlock their entrepreneurial spirit whenever they can.

From the Prep to the top of the Senior School, our students have plenty of opportunities to develop an enterprise mindset which will help them way beyond their time at Surbiton High School, whether or not they become an entrepreneur in the future.

Inspiring the next generation of Entrepreneurs and Social Entrepreneurs.

Via our Enterprise (business) or Social Enterprise (charities) projects, programmes or courses, students are encouraged to develop their creativity, leadership and communication skills. It’s impossible to list everything that we do, but here are some highlights from 2017

Our prep school students took part in the ideas competition UnitedIDEAS and made it through to the regional finals. The Girls Prep won ‘Best Model’ against all the competition. Students in the prep also took part in a World Changing IDEAS Boot camp with 7billionideas and Year 4 students took part in the 8billCLUB over the spring term. We even held our first community day working with 5 local primary schools helping to inspire their students to think big.

Year 8 took part in our own internal social enterprise competition called #Make2017, where we challenged the girls to make as much money for charity as they could from an initial £25 per form. In the first term they concentrated on fundraising, before investing in a product in the second term and finally growing their funds in the final term. It was huge success with thousands of pounds raised for a local hospice.

We had a Year 9 team made it through to the final of #UnitedApp for the third year in a row. #UnitedApp is a United Learning enterprise competition which had over 500 teams take part in this. Our girls managed to make it into the top 3, finishing 3^rd in the highly competitive national competition.

We had over 100 Year 10 students take part in the second Unleashing Potential business course with Hampton School, learning about crowdfunding and being inspired by a panel of impressive entrepreneurs which included Edwina Dunn (founder of the Tesco Clubcard), Khurram Asif (Technology Entrepreneur), Emma Watkinson (CEO of the fashion label Silkfred) and Alex Preece (Founder of Reward Club) .

In Year 12, we had over 50 students take part in Young Enterprise, with one of our teams making the regional final again. We also had 30 students from Hampton School and Surbiton High School take part in the first ‘Reaching Potential’ business course. This was held at BDO who are one of the largest financial services firms in the world at their fantastic offices on Baker Street in London. Students worked on real life business issues and presented back their solutions to a board of directors.

Finally, Council 12 evolved and has now developed to include students from Year 7/8, the fashion show was a huge success, RAG week even included world record attempts this time, 30 students went to We DAY, Akenhan and KYGN continue to go from strength to strength, we had girls take part in SurbiTERN shadowing entrepreneurs in work experience week, IBM came back into work with our students, year 7 and 9 took part in activity days with 8billionideas and Year 10 took part in the Coca-Cola business challenge.

We encourage every student to make sure that there are involved with at least one enterprise or social enterprise activity a year.