Our company name is Fair Traders

 You can see photographs of our work in the Media Room

Post 16 Company News

This Year Post 16 has continued to be involved with the Young Enterprise organization which is a business and enterprise education charity.  It offers a range of programmes, based on the principle of Learning by Doing, which brings volunteers from business into the classroom to work with teachers and students.  One of the programmes enable students to work together to run their own real company over a two year period. As a result “Fair-Traders” a company developed and run by some of our Post 16 students has been established.  We have a business partner who works in the Finance industry who comes into school to support us.  The students are completely involved in every aspect of running the company, including choosing a company name, designing company logo, organizing Board Meetings, developing and producing new products, marketing and selling the products and keeping a financial account of the business.  Throughout the week the students are able to develop and produce items in their mini-enterprise lessons and keep up to date with the administrative tasks in their business Admin lessons.  So far the company has been a great success and has given the students a wide variety of new opportunities for learning and the achievement of skills in a real life setting.  This year we are again entering a small number of students for a qualification in Enterprise which involves “Reviewing the success of an Enterprise company”.

This year the students in Year 12 have been part of the Craft production team. Every Thursday they have spent the morning developing skills to help them produce items such as aprons, bags, cushion-covers, table-ware, doorstops and a variety of other items to sell as part of the business enterprise.  They have used equipment such as the sewing machine, iron, pins thread needles scissors and patterns, choosing appropriate materials shopping for these and also costing, pricing and labeling the completed items.  They have learned how to pin and tack fabric, use the iron and also use the pedal foot to operate the sewing machine with assistance.  They have also learned useful information on ‘Safety in the Workplace’ and working as part of a team.  

Students in Year 13 have been members of the Card Making production team this year the. Each Tuesday they have spent the morning learning skills to help them produce cards to sell as part of the business enterprise.  They have focused on design, choosing appropriate materials, identifying their customers, sourcing materials, and using a variety of tools to produce good quality cards. They have learned how to use the embossing heat gun to make embossed designs, they have used stampers to create prints, they have used the big shot die cutting machine to produce die cuts to decorate the cards and they have looked at packaging and pricing cards.