Features – Santander

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In May 2015 Santander Commercial & Corporate Banking held a week-long business festival in a portable ‘Red Box’ in St Andrew Square celebrating defining ‘breakthrough moments’ for many of Scotland’s businesses. With over 20 different events, St Andrew Square was transformed into a place of ideas, entrepreneurship and networking for the Scottish business community and saw around 400 people pass through the box over the course of the week.

Speakers at the festival included the Executive Manager of Edinburgh Castle, the founder of the worldwide phenomenon Morphsuits, the Chief Executive of Edinburgh City Council and the Managing Director of Codebase, the largest technology incubator in the UK to name a few. In organising the festival Santander approached Craigroyston Community High School and asked for student volunteers to help them with a variety of tasks in both the run-up and during the festival.

One of the tasks set was to design a logo for the event that encapsulated the ‘Breakthrough Moments’ that would dominate the sessions taking place throughout the week – ‘breakthrough moments’ were the stories that would be shared by entrepreneurs about those important moments or milestones that they had experienced whilst building their businesses. Representatives from Santander judged all of the designs and were really impressed with how the Craigroyston students had managed to grasp the spirit of the festival and incorporate it into their unique designs.

In the weeks leading up to the festival, Santander also arranged for a group of students to spend a morning in the workplace of one of our speakers, Jamie Coleman, the Managing Director of Codebase, the UK’s largest tech incubator and home to some of the most exciting tech/digital companies in the UK. Students were able to spend time visiting a variety of companies, from app designers to specialist medical equipment producers, and given hands on demonstrations of new mobile apps and lifesaving medical equipment. It was a great experience for the students seeing entrepreneurs at work and gave them an insight into how companies on our doorstep are changing the world we live in. Santander also asked the pupils to negotiate some of the catering requirements for the festival with local entrepreneur Erica Moore, owner of Eteaket, one of Edinburgh’s most popular tea houses. With a budget to stick to, the students bartered with Erica to make sure that appropriate items and quantities were ordered within budget.

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When the festival itself arrived between the 11th and 15th May, the students that had visited Codebase were invited to the Red Box to listen to Jamie deliver a breakfast presentation to an audience of business owners and professional advisors. The students had to meet at school very early in the morning and travelled with their Business Education teacher, Mrs Ward, into St Andrew Square. During the session itself, they were able to expand upon the knowledge that they had absorbed from their visit to Codebase, as well as providing valuable assistance in the running of the event, welcoming and registering guests upon arrival and serving them suitable refreshments. It was wonderful to see the students chatting with local business people sharing what they had learnt from their experiences.

After the box had been cleared and tidied up after this breakfast session, more students and teachers from Craigroyston made the journey into the City Centre to meet up with their classmates and attend a private event delivered by Alice Thompson, a young entrepreneur and co-founder of sandwich shop chain Social Bite and Adam Purves, co-founder of Power of Youth, a global network of young entrepreneurs. Both presenters delivered inspiring presentations with valuable messages for the students to take away about following their dreams and how business owners not only need to make profits but also can make a difference to people’s lives by how they choose to spend those profits. At this session, Santander also presented the Craigroyston students responsible for designing the special logos with printed T Shirts as a lasting memory of the wonderful contribution that they had made to the festival. The logos were also used on ‘thank you’ cards that Santander sent to all festival contributors in the week after the event.

Finally a month after the festival had taken place, Steve Hand from Santander returned to the school for feedback from the student volunteers that had been involved throughout the whole project. Our students shared what they had enjoyed the most and what had been the biggest challenge they had faced. Steve was particularly impressed with the work the team of students had put in to produce an engaging PowerPoint presentation and how they all shared responsibility for standing up and delivering their personal experiences alongside the slide presentation.

At the end of a wonderful collaboration between our school and Santander, Steve commented, “It was a pleasure for Santander to involve and work with students from Craigroyston as part of our ‘Breakthrough Moments’ business festival. It was fantastic to see the students benefit from new experiences, develop skills and clearly increase in confidence during the time they were working on the project. Not only were the students a great help to us, they were also a real credit to the school. In a festival that was all about celebrating entrepreneurship, Craigroyston Community High Schools’ students certainly showed themselves ‘to be the business!’”

An example of some of the Edinburgh businesses Craigroyston Community High School students were able to research as a result of being involved in the business festival are listed in the ‘Links’ section below.