Primary 6 pupils at Boghall Primary School have been developing their Business enterprise skills. Chris Clayton from “Grey Matters” is a management consultant who visited Boghall Primary to work with Primary 6 pupils to develop their enterprise and employability skills such as collaboration, higher order thinking skills, communication and decision making skills. Chris has worked with many businesses such as Liverpool FC, NHS and Local Authorities, this being his first experience with primary school children.

The pupils were set a business challenge where they were given a “bad” business and their aim was to work as a team and use their enterprise and employability skills to improve the business. Pupils had to find ways to make the business more productive by finding ways to improve it. Improvements involved negotiating deals, choosing to spend money on equipment or staff, reducing waiting time for customers and making the business run more efficiently.  The challenge lasted four hours and the winning team successfully improved the business and made a profit of £3250.

After working with the children, Chris said, “I was very impressed with the pupils’ ability to ‘think outside the box’. It was very clear that the children had previous experience of working in this way. They were very creative and all groups were able to apply their skills to improve the business. The children performed better in the challenge than some of the adults I have worked with before!”

Boghall Primary has a strong emphasis on developing skills for life. Teachers Lynsey O’Neill and Zoe Armstrong said “It was great to watch them in action applying their skills which as a school we have worked hard to develop through our school enterprise programme.”