Local Academy set real life challenge

This month Parafix has been working with the Sir Robert Woodard Academy (SRWA) to help their year 12 students experience real life business challenges.

A group of five students were tasked with identifying solutions for the high cost of disposing waste and avoiding potentially usable waste going to landfill. They had just one week to identify solutions, conduct research and prepare a presentation of their work.

The students worked really hard on this difficult challenge and presented four solutions to resolve the waste issues in the short and long term. Their recommendations included working with similar companies and suppliers to create a long term waste solution, as well as giving suitable waste to education institutions for use in their art departments.

Managing Director Michael Punter commented “The students impressed us in that they clearly understood the challenge; they listened, they researched it within the limited time and experience they had, they presented well as a team and made some interesting recommendations that we will pursue. They are a credit to SRWA, well done.”

The school commented “For our real-life enterprise challenge week here at Sir Robert Woodard Academy we appealed to a selection of local and national businesses to give us a real problem they were facing and to let our students tackle it and come up with a solution.

The students got the opportunity to develop their team-working, problem-solving and presentation skills as they got to grips with the problem set by the organisations. Overall the students gained invaluable experience and they blossomed in confidence throughout and really did themselves proud as they presented back their work to the businesses. We can already see that it has begun to help equip the students with the grit and resilience needed to be attractive candidates to universities/employers. Huge thanks to all the businesses who supported the young people.”