During spring term, Treloar's Sixth Form enterprise group, developed a card-making business project as part of their curriculum. This initiative aims to enhance students' future employability skills.
Treloar's sixth form curriculum is designed to prepare students for their next steps into adulthood. It's based around a range of Employability and Enterprise opportunities, Preparation for Adulthood and Functional Skills taught through accreditation and qualifications. Subjects are differentiated to meet the learners’ individual needs.
Learning how to run a business
‘Super Duper Cards’ is the name of the business project led by Treloar's Sixth Form students. The students design and create cards, which are then sold at school events and to parents.
To begin, as part of putting together their business plan, the students explored all the different celebrations that people might send cards for. After some deliberation, the group decided to make Easter cards and a set of all-purpose cards.
The next step in the process was choosing and setting up props for the students to photograph with their iPads. This allowed students to create a lot of designs using photography, paint, stencils and stamps.
Once there were enough design ideas, the students put them together in different ways and then narrowed down their choices to a shortlist of a few favourite designs each.
To produce the cards, students learnt to print their designs from their computers, collect them from the printer, cut them to size and packaged them ready to sell.
To promote their products, students designed posters to advertise their cards, and each student took a turn looking after the stall in the Jowett Centre.
Building skills needed in a workplace
The idea behind this project is to assist students with building and practising skills that they would need in a workplace or to create their own business, such as handling money, creating products, advertising, social interactions, creative tasks and mundane tasks (like packaging), understanding the market and responding to customer feedback.
During their first sale, the students received positive feedback about ‘Thank you’ cards. As a result, one student added ‘Thank you’ to their design.
It was a very successful sale during which many products were almost sold out which meant there was lots of printing to be done before the second sale before Easter.
