Business savvy Hopwood students raise over £300 for charity

ESOL Entrepreneurs' Fair - Winning team celebrate

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ESOL students at Hopwood Hall College have raised £345 for the Alzheimer's Society, while developing employability skills in an internal ESOL Entrepreneur’s Fair.

The winning team members were Team E3 Study Programme (Aya Saadoon, Iara Dos Santos and Muddassar Hussain) who made £96.80 profit from their £10 investment. The E3 team’s success came after they invested their capital in buying and selling jewellery at the market stalls.

The event, designed to inspire young people with the spirit of enterprise and offer a real world experience of work, featured cake stalls, competitions, Henna artists, jewellery sales, book sales and market stalls.

Students attending the fair were tasked with putting a business idea into practice. Each group was funded with £10 seed money to invest, with the group who made the biggest profit by the end of the day winning free tickets to the cinema.

Of the teams in second and third, the second placed team used the £10 to fund a baking venture whereby the students cooked and sold dishes from their country of origin, whilst the third placed team set up a campus penalty shootout competition with an entry fee.

Aya Saadoon said, “I really enjoyed this project because it helped me to understand work and business and how to make a profit, I enjoyed the experience of selling things.”

The ESOL course itself is primarily designed to improve written and spoken English for those whose first language is not English.

ESOL Programme Manager, David Perry, said: “The students worked really hard on this, choosing winners was very difficult as a number of groups made a fantastic profit.

“They should all be proud to have done their bit for charity in the process too. Hopefully the fair will encourage them to continue to continue their business acumen.”