Barry Comprehensive School

Brainstorming ideas for the Challenge

Forty students from Barry Comprehensive School signed up to compete in the UK’s largest enterprise challenge for secondary schools and colleges.

The Make Your Mark Challenge is a one-day, national enterprise competition for students aged 14 – 19. The challenge kick-started Global Entrepreneurship Week (17 – 23 November) and aimed to improve young people’s enterprise capabilities.

The teams finalise their plans

Barry Comprehensive students went head-to-head with their counterparts from thousands of other secondary schools and colleges across the country when they were challenged to come up with unique and inspiring ideas in response to a secret brief launched online at the Make Your Mark website.

Declan Swann, Chief Executive of the National Education Business Partnership (NEBP), said: “The NEBP network is delighted to be working with Make Your Mark for the fourth year running to help deliver this exciting enterprise challenge, taken up by so many secondary schools and colleges. We look forward to seeing what fantastic innovations this year’s teams come up with.”

Using the ICT resources of the Learning Resource Centre during the Challenge

Catherine Ritman-Smith, Head of Education at the Make Your Mark campaign, said: “The Make Your Mark Challenge provides an opportunity to integrate enterprise across the curriculum, by encouraging young people to use their talents and interests to bring their ideas to life. It allows students to take risks, be innovative, make money through creating and selling, come up with solutions to local issues and to think on a global scale.”

Last year, over 38,000 students from more than 7,000 teams had to answer the challenge ‘make it pay in a globalocal way’, encouraging them to think on a global scale and act on a local level. One of the winning ideas was ‘Truck Trackers’, which links up small businesses that need to deliver goods but cannot fill an entire truck.

The Make Your Mark Challenge has been awarded the Inspire Mark by London 2012 because it contributes to the development of a skilled and enterprising future workforce and complements the aims of Get Set, the London 2012 education programme. Many of the young people who participate in the Challenge will be in the early stages of their careers by 2012 and will be some of the people who take forward the London 2012 Olympic & Paralympic legacy for future generations.

The winner for Barry Comprehensive was Bananas in Pyjamas with their idea of Olympic Top Trumps.

The winning team for Barry Comprehensive was Bananas In Pyjamas (Sam Rimell, Lewis Jenkins, Luke Elworthy, Scott Miller, Andrew Fortt and Matthew Anstee) with their idea of Olympic Top Trumps.

AC 2008-12-11