Envision Pitch Challenge

Pupils earn praise from business leaders

A group of Year 12 students from St. Martin-in-the-Fields Academy have earned positive praise from St. James's Place Wealth Management business leaders in the Community-Apprentice Pitching Challenge.

The ten-month Community-Apprentice competition requires students to develop, and crucially evidence, four key skills; teamwork, resilience and problem solving, organisation and communication. The programme has recently been recognised by the Department of Education as an effective model for employer engagement, inspiring students to develop their employability skills while tackling real-life problems.

Our school has two teams entering the Community-Apprentice competition this year which is running in 12 schools across the city.  Loosely based on the TV show The Apprentice, young people, working in teams, compete to develop, and crucially demonstrate, their skills whilst managing their own projects.  But in this case, they compete not to see who can make the most money, but who can make the biggest positive impact on their community.

Turning ideas into action

Over the past few weeks the teams have been coming up with ideas and developing them into a practical plan.  They have set a clear goal, identified relevant activities, allocated responsibilities, set deadlines, identified resources and produced a budget.

Team New Gen have decided to raise awareness of the negative aspects of gentrification and are looking at the Brixton Arches as their case study, and Project Avenir want to improve youth opportunities such as art classes and C.V. writing by running in-school workshops.