The Trust made an initial grant of £22,500 to enable them to raise their profile, thereby attracting employee volunteering partners and leveraging further funding. An additional grant of £2,500 was made to fund the development of a business plan. The Trust has contributed £25,000 over two years.

Careers education advisers in schools often struggle to find speakers on a full variety of careers. This task is made much easier using the Growing Ambitions database. Over 500 careers are listed on the website, with more being added all the time. The service will ultimately become self-funding by modest fees paid by the educational establishments (both annual and per speaker visit) but initial help is required to build the data base of career speakers. In addition to helping find speakers, Growing Ambitions also helps the Secondary and Further Education sector to fulfil their Work-Related Learning obligations. Business is provided with a low cost but valuable means of putting something back into the community by encouraging their staff to volunteer, which in turn provides them with a Corporate Social Responsibility tool that is easy to administer. Businesses can also partner with Growing Ambitions by linking their organisations to them via their own intranets and a number have already done so.

The arrival of Growing Ambitions has been received enthusiastically by such organisations as City and Guilds, British Chambers of Commerce, The Institute of Directors and Portsmouth City Council. Further information can be found on the Growing Ambitions website www.growingambitions.org

In mid-September 2004, The Higher Education Funding Council (HEFCE) was concerned about the poor participation rate in Higher Education of children of parents in low socio-economic groups. To remedy this, steps were in hand and the Universities were collaborating. The Government believed that it was essential to ensure that applications and admissions to higher education were predicated on genuine intellectual ability and the ability to succeed rather than on background, school attended and other parameters .The Independent Sector supported these initiatives.

Bedford School (Independent) approached the Trust for funding to pilot an Independent school/maintained school(s)/ HEI (Higher Education Institute) Partnership Initiative for the use of video conferencing. The project was expected to bring effective outreach and was dependent on co-operation between the partners. The school took on a key role as partnership manager.

To get the project up and running, in addition to the Trust’s contribution of £22,500 for videoconferencing equipment, contributions either in cash or in kind were given by the following organisations:

• Bedford School: funding for a special broadband connection: £8,870 per annum.
• Sheffield University: own equipment and £5,000 to Bedford School for its videoconferencing Equipment
• Bedfordshire LEA: a link to the East of England broadband link at subsidised cost
• The Sutton Trust: £10,000 over two years for a Manager to administer the project

The project went live with two maintained schools in the loop initially. These were Biddenham Upper and John Bunyan. A full list of lectures and conferences has been and continues to be compiled and the project is continuing to expand with participations from other universities and maintained schools, despite some technical problems.

The course taught the participants the fundamentals of strategy, marketing, finance, operations, and human resources from the perspective of an entrepreneur, leveraging Imperial Business School’s strong positioning in the venture capital / entrepreneurship sector. By the end of the course, Teach First teachers were able to act and operate entrepreneurially in any work or life context, whether it was in submitting proposals, to writing compelling business plans for an employer. The course also contained a number of specialist Majors which the participants could choose to further their knowledge in a particular industry.

The course sought to allow the teachers to demonstrate and hone their newly acquired knowledge to benefit their schools and pupils. Together with their education partners and Imperial, Teach First ran a venture competition which encouraged teams of Teach First participants to come up with unique project ideas that were sustainable, leveraged the knowledge they had learnt, involved their school communities and local businesses, and which could demonstrate tangible impact on their pupils’ learning. The aim was that such projects would benefit pupils both academically and vocationally, helping them to broaden their horizons as they came into contact with local and global businesses.

For one school year, young people, between fifteen and nineteen years of age, set up and run their own real life businesses with the help of volunteer business mentors. They raise share capital from friends and family, open bank accounts, decide on a product or service, develop a business plan, trade, and eventually, towards the end of the programme, put their company into voluntary liquidation and report to their shareholders. 

Since the launch of the Inner City Programme the number of schools participating has increased from six to forty this year. The geographical coverage of the programme has been expanded from just six central London boroughs to all thirty-three and funding has been leveraged from a corporate supporter, Deutsche Bank.

Furthermore, Young Enterprise London has been able to attract additional funds this year to enhance the young people's learning experience through a volunteering scheme from V Good Match, a government-funded initiative.

Overall, the partnership with the Trust has been hugely successful. Young Enterprise London has been able to support over 1,500 young people to set up and run businesses, helping them to develop their entrepreneurial and enterprise skills and thereby to make a better future for themselves.