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Last week, our LVI students participated in Young Enterprise; a sales event at Spitalfields, London. There they competed against 47 other teams for product sales, and presented a business pitch to a panel of judges who challenged them in a Dragon’s Den-style Q&A.

Young Enterprise is a nationwide organisation that gives students the chance to set up a real business and to learn valuable entrepreneurial skills. The programme is an amazing opportunity, which our students were very lucky to be a part of.

This year, 13 Hurst students from the Lower Sixth formed their own business—Kuodos Ltd—that produces decorative lanterns. Since September, the team had been meeting regularly to define their management structure and work on all the different aspects of running a business: production, marketing, sales, and co-ordination. The students have really learned how to work well as a team, and to make things happen from scratch. They have broadened their knowledge of the business world, getting to grips with patents, copyright laws, share capital, and pitching.

It has been a challenge for our students to fit everything around their very busy Hurst schedules, and there were many crunch points along the way where they had to put in multiple extra hours to meet production deadlines. However, the experience as a whole has been a hugely rewarding one, and the team have developed many skills—resilience, organisation, and public speaking—which will serve them well beyond this project.

Well done to all those students who participated in YE this year. We look forward to seeing which new business will be formed next time!