Empowering Your Child’s Future

If anyone knows just how creative and curious your 11 or 12 year old is, it’s you. They’re at a great stage in their lives right now, and it’s also a crucial one for their future development.

At this age, your child is old enough to know a bit about how the working world works, enthusiastic enough to learn and work together with their peers, and still young enough to be unaffected by the growing “career pressure” that comes with secondary education. That’s why it’s the perfect time for them to take part in the Junior Entrepreneur Programme (JEP), and get a practical taste of real-world experience that’ll stand to them for life.

HELPING WITH MATHS

During JEP, children invest a small amount of their own money and need to monitor costs and sales closely to ensure they create a profit. They learn fast when they are talking about their own money. In a JEP survey, 85% of teachers said that JEP enhanced the teaching of maths. 97% of participating pupils said they would recommend it to a friend.

HOW CAN YOUR CHILD PARTICIPATE?

If you’re interested in having your child take part in JEP, speak to their teacher who, if they wish to proceed, can sign up the class with JEP. The programme is free of charge. The JEP team will be delighted to speak to your teacher. As JEP is a schools programme, we are not in a position to engage directly with parents.

The SOCIETAL Benefits

100% of teachers surveyed by JEP said that the programme was beneficial to both pupils and their school. By signing your class up, you’ll be part of a movement which has allowed 90,000 Irish children to realise their creative potential since 2010.

Empowering Your Child’s Future

The Junior Entrepreneur Programme was created to allow every primary school pupil in Ireland the opportunity to embrace entrepreneurship as part of their formative education.

Thinking Like an Entrepreneur

JEP departs from traditional teaching, allowing the teachers to become facilitators, letting pupils think freely and understand what entrepreneurship really means. Children use their creativity to come up with individual business ideas, then they come together as a class to choose one idea and work as a team to turn the chosen idea into reality over a 12-16 week period. They meet with a local entrepreneur to hear their story and ask questions. Many children have expressed surprise that such exciting enterprises are on their doorsteps. Their questions and reports on these visits reveal incisive questions and deep understanding of important activity in their locality.

Learning New Skills

Pupils carry out market research to test and refine their project idea before moving on to the next step. Then the really great personal development work starts; pupils identify their unique strengths and talents and work out how they can best contribute to the business. They pupils break into five teams: Finance, Marketing & Technology, Design & Production, Sales and Communications. Before going on to make and sell their product. They invest a small amount of their own money, which they hope to recoup with a profit. They calculate their estimated costs and sales, which they compare with their actual results at the end of the programme. The programme culminates in the school show case day, when the learning, hard work and creativity together and family, the rest of the school and the wider community are invited to enjoy the results.

The Benefits

The programme is structured to facilitate every child’s participation throughout the process. There are many different forms of intelligence and creativity and through JEP many children become more aware of their own unique skills and talents for the first time and find a way to shine. In addition to covering core aspects of the curriculum in a novel and engaging way, teachers have reported marked developments in confidence, team building, communications and independence in children who have participated.

JEP is provided at no cost to the school or pupils.

Eamonn Cowan
Ardfert Central National School