Our mission is to reduce the skills gap by facilitating and assisting the provision of inspirational careers education to people under the age of 25.
Founders4Schools (F4S) was established in 2015 by serial entrepreneur, Sherry Coutu CBE, as a solution to the rising skills gap she saw in the workforce. She wanted to make it easy for educators to improve the employment chances of young people by bringing inspirational role models into the classroom.
We have created a unique digital platform that offers a free, simple and quick way for educators to book role models encounters either in the classroom or virtually, ensuring flexibility and accessibility to students without barriers. This supports young people to feel empowered and confident about their future career opportunities and prepares them for the rapidly changing world of work.
F4S has grown over the last six years to support over 460,000 students, through 1.4 million role model encounters and facilitated over 21,000 hours of volunteering from a network of over 6,000 diverse role models.
Our model is aligned with the UN Sustainable Development Goals to achieve a sustainable future for all and help to drive a skilled and diverse workforce. We also focus on three pillars to help prepare young people for the jobs of today and the future; digital careers, sustainability and Maths4Girls - driving equity in STEM.
Help us today to ensure we can continue to inspire and engage young people as they enter into an incredibly challenging job market.
"Using F4S helps our students to relate to the working world and brings their subjects to life. It also helps them to realise the skills that are needed for the working world."
- Teacher at Kingsthorpe College
Want to know more about F4S?
Our People
Our Trustees, Leadership Team
and Advisory Council.
Our Impact
Discover how we make an impact on the
future career choices of young people.
Our Partners
Working together to build brighter
futures for young people.
Our Mission
We have a passion for improving the
employability of young people.
Our Blog
Keep up to date with all our latest news,
events and F4S in the news.
Our Awards
Our work has been recognised
by various bodies over the years.
So how does it work?
Easy for educators
Simply search your location and we’ll show you business leaders, local or across the UK depending on what you need. Apply filters such as gender or industry to find your perfect match. Once you’ve selected business role models to invite simply choose your dates, sign up and leave the rest to us! Still not sure? Then book on to one of our Educator Webinars for a Q&A session with our Engagement Team.
We have impact
Research shows that students who have 4 student-employer encounters are 5 times less likely to become NEET and 3 times more likely to choose a STEM subject. To date we’ve facilitated over 1.4 million student-employer encounters and 96% of students felt inspired by the speakers. To see where we’re having an impact, see our free Insight Reports.
Our Story
Born in 2011, Founders4Schools began as an extension of Silicon Valley Comes to the UK as a manually curated idea to bring inspiring entrepreneurs to universities and schools. The feedback from parents, educators and students was so powerful, we decided to think about how we could use technology common in other industries to the education industry. So by 2013, spurred on by encouragement from Government, industry and the educational sector we collaborated with LinkedIn, edubase, duedil to create a tech platform that supercharged educators to create student-employer encounters as easily as buying a book on Amazon.