Annual Review 2017/18

The past year has been one of both consolidation and development for Founders4Schools. Our services, for arranging encounters between young people and local business leaders, are becoming embedded into the lives of schools and young people. Our strategy has always been to prioritise our resources to where they are most needed. Reaching young people in the Government’s 12 Social Mobility Opportunity Areas is important to our activities, and the team and I have enjoyed visiting each of the opportunity areas over the past year.

I am pleased that at the time of writing, Founders4Schools has now brokered nearly 215,000 young people to meet on average 3 business leaders from their local communities, helping them to better understand the world they will enter when they are older, and the jobs they might hold or create in the future. This is up from 80,000 in the 2016-2017 review.

We continue to adapt our services both in line with the requests of stakeholders in our ecosystem and in response to research that shows interactions to be critical in early years as a foundation and also in later years as a springboard for the transition to work. In the past twelve months, we significantly enhanced the range of Student-Employer Encounters (SEEs) that can be arranged over our platform to over twenty, we introduced our services to Scotland and we extended the age our services covers to be from 6 -24 (up from 8-18 previously).

• We integrated our back-end systems so that educators could opt-in automatically sharing encounters that take place on our platform with the Careers and Enterprise Company.
  
• We built on our services so that they are aligned with the Gatsby Foundation and the Skills Builder Framework, led by Enabling Enterprise.
  Growing so quickly is not easy: The achievements of Founders4Schools rely on the involvement, enthusiasm and dedication of many stakeholders in our society. I want to thank: the educators who have embraced our services to enhance the life prospects of their students; the volunteers who have so generously given up their time to inspire and motivate young people; our Trustees and Advisors, whose support and guidance plays a huge part in the charity’s success; and the many individuals and grant making bodies who have helped to fund the services. Finally, I would like to thank Founders4Schools’ dedicated team of staff, who share my vision in making a fundamental difference to the career chances of young people and the competitive advantage firms that drive economic growth.
  Looking forward to July 2019, we look to continue with our strategy of
  1) deepening our interconnections with other partners so that our efforts are seamlessly coordinated within the ecosystem,
  2) refining our student, educator, business leader and partner services so that they continue to drive student – employer encounters in communities throughout the UK and
  3) expanding into other geographies.