The student studio
Senior students build for local businesses, supervised. What it earns goes back into the lab.
Who this suits. A branch with a strong senior group and a teacher who would enjoy running something that behaves like a small business.
- Could start
- A full year in, and only in a branch where the senior programme is already working
- What it asks of the school
- Committed
How it runs
A supervised group of classes 11 and 12 students takes on small jobs for people nearby: the chemist, the tuition centre, a parent's shop, the school's own alumni association.
The teacher owns every conversation with the customer. Students do the work, present it, and take the feedback. No student deals with an outside adult unsupervised, and no job is taken on without the teacher agreeing it can be finished.
What the studio earns goes to the lab or the activity fund. For most schools this covers the programme and then some.
What each side puts in
The school provides
- A teacher who will own the relationships with customers
- A clear rule about which jobs may be accepted and which may not
- Somewhere for the money to go that is not anyone's pocket
The school gets
- A programme that funds itself, and sometimes more
- Standing in the neighbourhood, which is worth more than the money
- An entrepreneurship story that is actually true
The students get
- A customer, a deadline and a person who will say what is wrong with it
- The best possible line on a college application
- The clearest lesson available on what work is worth
How it is paid for
It funds itself once it is running. The school still needs a starting budget for the first term, because the studio has to build a few things before anyone pays it for anything.
There is no price on this page, and that is on purpose. What this costs to run depends on how it is taught — short exercises shared between a few students cost a fraction of what long solo projects cost — and we would rather measure that in your school than quote a number we cannot stand behind. Whatever follows a pilot is agreed in writing before the pilot begins.
The catch
This one is genuinely harder than it sounds, and it is the model most likely to go wrong. Children are dealing with adults outside the school, so your safeguarding rules govern it before anything we say does. A customer who has paid will expect the app to keep working after the student has left for college, and somebody has to answer that phone. Start it only after a branch has run the senior project for a year.
Every model on the main page carries one of these, and the same page lists what we have not built yet. Everything we have not finished across the whole product is on our trust page.
Start with one class, one term, free.
Whichever model you end up running, the first step is the same: one branch, one teacher, one term, at no cost.
Talk to us about a pilot