Month: June 2016

written by Sherry Coutu

I’m really pleased to share that this week we are celebrating our First-year anniversary at Founders4Schools since graduating from having been a project run by volunteers out of SVC2UK to be being registered as a charity.

Since that time we  have formed almost 200 educational partnerships and brokered more than 100,000 student-employer encounters.   Pretty neat when you consider the Gatsby Foundation research that shows that encounters with just four business leaders decreases ten-fold a student’s likelihood of becoming NEET. It goes without saying that these100,000 Student-Employer encounters we are responsible for came at no cost to the student, teacher, school or employer.

Approximately 10,000 business leaders can be found by teachers to invite into their classrooms and careers fairs.  We make it easy for the teacher to choose the best leaders according to what is best for their students:  We help teachers ensure gender balance in role models invited to speak and curricular and sectoral balance by the recommendation engine behind our search results. We have made it easy for teachers by employing engineers to use data science to draw and combine information held in Government and Social Media Databases in a novel manner that is remarkably cheap and effective.

Impact:

I’m excited that our role models triple the percentage of students that choose STEM as a subject:  This is important as the 1.2 million job openings these companies have are predominantly in roles that require an understanding of STEM subjects.

Impact Reporting:

The ability to compare number of student-employer encounters by city, Political Constituency, Local Authority, or partner has ushered in  a new era in the granularity of impact reporting in educational charities.

Collaboration:

In honour of our first birthday, we are delighted to pause to thank all of our partnerswhose encouragement and support have made this possible and with whom we intend to continue the journey to close the skills gap by inspiring greater numbers of young people across the UK to explore the world of business and technology as a high impact career option.

I’d like to start by thanking my friend Reid Hoffman (Founder of LinkedIn) whose support from the very beginning of Founders4Schools has been instrumental in enabling this engagement between students and entrepreneurs to take place. He will knows more than most importance of role models, how fast our labour markets are re-configuring and why it is important for the entire ecosystem to support the talent gap.

Secondly, we would like to thank the Department for Education for creating and sharingEdubase.  Without their having done this, we would be unable to verify teachers’ identity or link them to a school and this would have made it impossible for us to have persuaded LinkedinforGood to licence F4S their various APIs.  Nor would we be able to check the National Pupil’s Database what subjects the students are choosing as a result of the type of student-employer encounters they are experiencing.  The existence of an open verified source for teachers prevents us from being able to offer our service in other countries. Access to the NPD allows us to be able to see what works without lowering the productivity of the teacher by surveying them.

Thirdly, I’d like to thank the Department for Business, Innovation and Skills for creating Companies House and for enabling its content to be made available to Duedil.  Without your having done this, we would not be able to guarantee the quality of the recommendation we make to teachers. Thank you Damian Kimmelman,  the founder and CEO of Duedil, for your encouragement and support and for continuing to licence us to use your API.  Thank you also Adam Jackson, who headed up Enterprise for BIS who gave us the original grant that allowed us to be able to pay Andy Ashburner, the clever designer who we outsourced the Proof Of Concept of F4S engineering to.

The existence of these databases and the generosity of these people has meant that the very creation of services like F4S is possible.  It gave me confidence to hire an amazing set of people, like Nick Harrison to take forward the POC Andy Ashburner had put together for us, which in turn enabled us to recruit an amazing Board of Trustees andBoard of Advisors who in turn made it possible to put together a convincing case toClaudia Harris from the Careers and Enterprise Company to extend a generous grant to us and to choose to include F4S in 35 of the 39 toolkits for LEPS in the UK, it enabled us to put a case to Kirstie Mackay from Barclays lifeskills to license F4S materials we use to brief teachers and employers on employability. It enabled us to convince people like George Burgess (Gojimo), David Buttress (JustEat), Joanne Hannaford, Josh Graff(LinkedIn), Jon Steinberg (Google) to encourage colleagues to help us overcome the myriad of technical barriers a small engineering charity otherwise would have found insurmountable.

New Features:

Founders4Schools will also launch a new feature to celebrate its first birthday -workplace visits.   This is our third ‘employability service’ and is interesting in that it flips our normal model of leaders-to-students and brings the students-to-the leader’s HQ’s for the businesses.

Workplace visits is the pre-cursor to “work-experience” which are co-creating with a number of partners to be the fourth service in our suite of student-attainment and employability services. We are piloting Proof Of Concept in Cambridge, Manchester and Camden, and all being well, will be able to roll this out in 2017.

We are also working hard to adapt our services to be available to the Prince’s Trust,  The Scouts and other geographies which we feel will dramatically transform our reach to students from disadvantaged backgrounds and improve transparency and charity impact reporting at the same time.

Thank you for what you have enabled coming up to our first birthday and also for what we are co-creating in the future.  I look forward to reflecting on our achievements by our second birthday.