Bright Stars

Bright Stars 2022

We are excited to partner with NIS for this year's Bright Stars programme. 

Stars is an exciting collaboration between Centre for Leadership Performance, primary schools and local businesses across Cumbria that encourages leadership and responsible entrepreneurship from a young age and builds relationships between businesses and their local primary schools that benefit communities.

Bright Stars is a competition aimed at Primary school children across Cumbria. Each school is partnered with a local business and receives £50. The mission is to set up their own mini business over the course of eight weeks. This year’s objective is: To make a profit and make a difference – to follow the very best examples of self-sustaining social enterprise. Pupils will be judged on the ideas to grow that money and ultimately make a difference to their world and the lives of people around them.

Click here for a brochure about the Primary Programme or visit the CLPE website here.

Week 1: 

We explored the question What is a business? Anthony from NIS came in to talk to us about the company and the different roles within the company. We then looked at social enterprises, with children researching in groups to find information about different social enterprises in Cumbria. They presented their findings to the class.

Finally, we introduced the BrightStars competition and began to formulate ideas, using our teamwork skills and voting on our favourites. The end result was that the class would like to set up an event, comprising different activities and stalls. They would like to donate profits to the North Lakes Food Bank in accordance with Sustainable Development Goals 1 and 2. Here are some photos from week 1:

Week 2: This we were joined by Anthony again to finalise ideas for our event. We worked in teams to create a mindmap of ideas and pooled these together to form our final plan:

Part of this plan involved coming up with a company name/event name and a logo. We designed logos individually and voted for the winner (pictured above). Here are some more of our designs:

Weeks 3 & 4

During Week 3, we were joined by Gil from NIS as well as Anthony, as we learned about the different teams and job roles within a company. Using this information, we then completed job applications for our own company roles. We thought about our skills, experience and interest to help us. We also appointed a Managing Director and Assistant MD to help oversee operations going forwards. 

In Week 4 we split into 3 teams. The admin and creative team drafted formal persuasive letters to local businesses (shops, bakeries and grocers) to ask for sponsorship for our cake and lemonade stalls through donations of ingredients. 

The finance, sales and procurement teams worked together to find recipes for lemonade and used an online supermarket site to find and cost the ingredients to work out how much we would need to buy, how much we would need to spend and how much profit we could make. 

The health and safety team worked with the quality control team this week to ensure our cake stall would be successful. We created a survey and gathered responses around the school, presenting our ideas to the finance team as a bar chart. We now know that we need plenty of chocolate cake on our stall! 

Week 5:

We had a fantastic response from several local businesses, including the CO-OP, Fidz Bakery, Gosforth Bakery and Andy Pratt. This will help us to keep costs down and maximise profit. 

This week was a busy one as we created all of the posters and signage for our event. We also created an advert ready to share in assembly and on our social media pages. Our friendship bracelets are well underway and we even used some of our woodland time to continue working on these!