Educators Tips for Organising a Meaningful Event

Overview

Founders4Schools provides educators in the UK with access to free inspirational volunteer role models who speak to young people about their experiences as leaders of fast-growing businesses that create the majority of innovation and jobs in our economy or as employees who work for companies that are driving growth in a wide range of sectors such as digital, sustainability, energy, finance and marketing or have work in STEM-related roles and industries.

Founders4Schools is a free online service for educators to create events that inspire their students by inviting business role models into the classroom. Events are managed easily and conveniently online and conveniently online in a few minutes. This way, educators can introduce their students to real-life examples of the positive impact of entrepreneurship, innovation, technology and growing sectors in a time-efficient way.

This Educators Toolkit offers our suggestions based on previous experiences. We are open to incorporating input from you so please send your suggestions for this toolkit to teachers@founders4schools.org.uk. Enjoy your event!

What you can look forward to

Educators in the UK can arrange to bring leading volunteer role models from the world of work into their classrooms - for free.

• School students have an opportunity to hear speakers talk about their own career journeys to give young people to gain real insight into a variety of roles and to hear from diverse role models.
• Students are also given an opportunity to engage with speakers through a question and answer session.
• Headteachers, teachers and career leaders are given a solution to their problem of finding business people to inspire their students in an easy to manage, time saving way.
• Our business volunteers are given the ability to ‘give back’ to the school communities by ‘telling their story’ to help prepare the next generation of talent.

In School Visits Guidelines

Attendance: For the highest impact, please ensure that attendance is made mandatory and that a minimum of 100 students attend. Ideal audience size is 100-150 students, educators and invited guests.

Target age group: All students are welcome to attend the event. Students in Years 7-13 are especially encouraged to attend. Founders4Schools welcomes all schools, colleges and universities with students ages 6-24 to participate. We would recommend that you brief role models on the level of understanding of the age group to ensure they pitch their talk at the right level for your students.

Suggested Event Format: 60 Minutes

Online Career Inspiration Sessions Guidelines

Pre-Event: For the highest impact, please discuss the session with your class beforehand and think of questions that could be asked of the speakers. Also, please check your school's safeguarding policy as to whether or not the students are able to be on screen or not. If the students are not allowed on screen, we highly recommend that an educator leads the sessions and asks the questions from students so that the volunteers receive some input and aren't just talking to a screen

Target age group: All students are welcome to attend the event. Students in Years 7-13 are especially encouraged to attend. Founders4Schools welcomes all schools, colleges and universities with students ages 6-24 to participate. We would recommend that you brief role models on the level of understanding of the age group to ensure they pitch their talk at the right level for your students.

Suggested Event Format: 30 - 45 Minutes

Topics

Speakers are requested to ‘tell a story’ about their career journey:

• What inspired them to set up their company, train for their current job or work in their chosen sector
• Why they find it high impact
• What they enjoy most about their career
• Why students should consider this career option as their number 1 career choice
• Advice they would have found useful at that age

Speakers are not asked to prepare slides or come with demonstrations rather, they are briefed to ‘speak from the heart’. Some speakers will agree to prepare materials if asked with enough lead-time.

Other Event Formats

You can use the F4S to invite our volunteers to other types of events such as challenges and competitions or careers fairs however we ask that you be mindful of the timing as our volunteers are taking part for free and their travel costs are not covered. To make the event as effective as possible please provide a clear briefing about what your expectations are when they accept to ensure they are a good match for your event. You can contact the volunteer through the dashboard.

Further Questions

Have you taken a look at the Educator FAQs? You can take a look here take a look here.

If you have further questions, please reach out to teachers@founders4schools.org.uk.