Independent Schools Guide 2024: The school students building businesses

A number of secondary schools in Melbourne are engaging students in year-long entrepreneurial projects in which students identify problems, create business solutions and pitch their ideas with the help of industry mentors.

At Haileybury, Year 8 students participate in an entrepreneurship program called StartUp.

“Students learn skills that are easily transferable to many other areas,” says Sciences and Maths teacher Holly Emslie. “They discover how to work in a team, build a business from the ground up, turn ideas into action, and develop critical and creative thinking skills.”

Students Abi Ruiu, Maya Caverhill and Sari Jamieson, all aged 14, created an award-winning colouring book about body image. Their first challenge was coming up with a problem to solve.

“We thought about social media and then quickly agreed on body image,” Abi says. “We all see other people posting on social media and we can’t help but compare ourselves to them and it can become degrading and damaging.”

Next, the girls wrote on sticky notes and brainstormed business ideas.

“We thought about making podcasts or apps, but because online media is the problem, we decided to do something offline,” says Maya.

The team invited their school community of nine-to-13-year-olds, who were also their target audience, to contribute drawings for the book. They received 20 pages of artwork featuring drawings of girls and women with words such as “love your body” or “your weight does not define you”.

The students worked with Jodie Imam from Tractor Ventures, who encouraged them to pair with the Butterfly Foundation, a charity that supports people with eating disorders.

Their success meant they were invited to pitch their colouring book at the Wade Institute of Entrepreneurship awards, where they won a workshop to help commercialise the project.

Although the final pitch was scary, Abi says, “we also felt so rewarded because we’d spent the whole year on this, and we felt really proud that we got this far”.

Entrepreneurship is also a focus in Year 9, 10 and 11 classes at the Wheelers Hill Campus of Caulfield Grammar School. One team of students wanted to create a business to help young people like themselves search for their first job.

“The team felt that the existing search platforms just didn’t cater at all for young people, so their idea was to create their own one – BLOOM,” says Szuen Lim, Learning Area Leader – Commerce, Wheelers Hill Campus.

The school’s cafe used the platform to advertise jobs and get students to apply through it. The team was mentored by Amanda Walker, founder of vegan fastfood group Lord of the Fries. BLOOM entered the 2023 Teens in Business Awards run by the not-for-profit Young Change Agents and was a runner-up in the Teenpreneur Award. The team also received a micro-grant through Blackbird Venture Capital’s Protostars Program.

“This entrepreneurial experience is all part of [Caulfield Grammar School’s] ethos,” Lim says.