The new Hull school that aims to make young people ready for work

For far too long Hull has been labelled an educational backwater, but there’s no doubt that a whole raft of initiatives are transforming learning within the city.

The most obvious change can be seen in school buildings across Hull, as a result of a £400m Building Schools for the Future programme. Schools such as Archbishop Sentamu Academy in Preston Road and Sirius Academy in west Hull are more akin to silicon valley campuses than traditional secondaries. Those academies are also among several new-style schools seeking to drive up standards of attainment in a city which not long ago recorded the worst GCSE results in England.

And the initiatives keep coming. The latest is a studio school, pioneered by Hull College, one of only 12 in the UK and due to open in September at the college’s Queens Gardens site.

The studio school will be very different from traditional schools, or even the new academies. I heard about those differences during a presentation by the college’s Deputy Principal Gary Warke and Director of Young People’s Learning Lynne Richardson at the latest meeting of the One Hull Business Forum.

It was an appropriate audience, as the studio school is focused on developing young people to be ready for the world of work. Enterprise and employability are the key words, as the schools strives to address the often-heard criticism from businesses that school-leavers are not equipped with some of the basics - such as punctuality, professional appearance and communication skills - required of today’s workforce.

The studio school will take pupils aged 14-19 and be comparatively small, with a total of 300 pupils. The target is to enrol 120 in September - 60 aged 14 and 60 at 16.

The school day will run from 8am to 5pm and the emphasis throughout will be on practical work. Students will spend a significant proportion of the week in the workplace - those aged 14-16 will be on unpaid work placement for up to four hours a week, while the 16-19-year-olds will have up to two days paid employment.

The curriculum will focus on the core subjects of English, maths and science, alongside a choice of vocational qualifications. Education will be taken out of the usual classroom setting, with students learning primarily through project work.

The school will also employ what it calls “personal coaches” to support students and help to link them to employers, while the college says the new school’s disciplinary and reward systems will be based on those “commonly found within the workplace”.

And, in perhaps the most obvious difference from traditional schools, students will wear what is described as “business attire”, rather than uniforms.

I suspect much of the above will be warmly welcomed by employers, who often complain that young people lack the core skills, focus, attitude and, sometimes, sheer common sense to make a valuable contribution. Too often, a re-education process is required when young people join a business. The studio school aims to remove that process, by producing youngsters who are familiar with the expectations and demands of the real world of work.

The studio school will face many challenges, among them convincing sufficient parents to interrupt their child’s education by moving them from a traditional secondary, or academy, to the studio school at 14.

It also seems to me that the expectations for work placements and paid employment are ambitious, for both the students and employers. The studio school will certainly have to ensure that bringing students into their businesses is not unduly demanding for employers, in terms of supervision or health and safety requirements. The school will need to make it easy for employers to come on board and also demonstrate to them that their students can make a real contribution - that this isn’t old-style “work experience” under a new guise.

However, it is interesting to hear Hull College say they have the backing of more than 100 businesses already. P&O Ferries and Rollits are featured in the promotional literature.

The studio school is a certainly a brave and bold initiative, which deserves success. Employers will applaud Hull College’s faith in the concept if it delivers to them young people who have the inter-personal qualities, discipline, core skills and enterprising spirit to add value to their businesses.

It also adds another facet of innovation to the rapidly-improving education facilities and provision in Hull, as the city’s young people and, of course, their parents have access to greater options and opportunities than ever before.

Those improvements are now feeding through into raised attainment. As I write, newly-released statistics show Hull - once rooted to the bottom of the GCSEs league table - has climbed to sixth  from bottom. A long way to go, but progress nonetheless.

Of course, the studio school’s focus will not be purely on academic achievement, but on producing young people ripe for the workplace and, potentially, the entrepreneurs and wealth creators of the future. Academic ability and practical skills are both important - developing a better educated, more enterprising workforce will be vital to unlocking Hull’s economic potential.

·    Potential business supporters of the studio school are invited to attend a launch event at Queens Gardens on Thursday, 2nd February, from 4.30-5.30pm, with guest speaker David Frost CBE, Chair of the Studio Schools Trust and a former Director General of the British Chambers of Commerce. Attendance should be confirmed by e-mail to ebarker@hull-college.ac.uk or by phone on 01482 598817. This will be followed by an information event for parents and students from 6pm-7.30pm.

·     For more information about the studio school, contact Lyne Richardson at lrichardson@hull-college.ac.uk or 01482 381928. Further information on the studio schools concept can be found at www.studioschoolstrust.org

The modest maverick who brought the Internet to millions

They say entrepreneurs are by nature mavericks - they don't fit the business norms and don't play by the accepted rules.
That's certainly true of internet pioneer Ajaz Ahmed, a man with no qualifications, who has never done market research and builds businesses on doing things differently, courting controversy and going on gut instinct.
Ajaz , founder of the internet game-changer Freeserve, gave his story and the benefit of his wisdom at the Allam Lecture Theatre at the University of Hull, in an event organised by For Entrepreneurs Only.
And it's quite a story - how Ajaz joined Dixons from school, conquered his self-doubts, persuaded the group chief executive to plunge into the internet in its early days, and built a business worth £9bn at the height of the dotcom boom.
And Ajaz told it in a modest, unassuming, charming manner. A man who has achieved so much from humble beginnings but remains grounded. The event was free and he gave his time for free to an attentive audience of business people and, encouragingly, many students. No doubt they left inspired to pursue an entrepreneurial path.
Ajaz spent 17 years with Dixons rising to be one of their senior store managers, before his "eureka" moment - discovering the potential of the internet while running one of Dixons' PC World stores.
He saw the potential for Dixons to become an Internet Service Provider (ISP) and took the idea to his boss. The idea got kicked into the long grass, but Ajaz would not take no for an answer. He badgered the group chief executive and got his backing.
Not long after, Freeserve launched and became the biggest UK ISP in just three months. Six months later the business floated with a value of £1.5bn. Its value rocketed to £9bn, before the dotcom bubble burst. Three years on Dixons sold the business to France Telecom for £1.6bn as Ajaz went on to become a serial entrepreneur.
As he admitted, Ajaz had made mistakes (all risk-takers do), but he has learned plenty.
Here's just some of Ajaz's pearls of wisdom shared with his audience:

·         Vital to his success was dispelling negative self-beliefs. Early in his career Ajaz wrote on a card: "I'm as good as anybody else".

·         To be successful in business you just have to have a good idea or take over an existing business and do it better.

·         Read about successful people and their traits. Find out how they achieve success.

·         Do the obvious before everyone realises it's obvious, e.g. when CNN's Ted Turner pioneered 24-hour television news when nobody thought viewers would want it. Now we could not do without it.

·         So many businesses are  held back by not knowing people. You have to get into your customer's shoes.

·         Believe in your gut instincts. Ajaz has never done market research, but then neither have Apple or IKEA - they just understand their customers' needs and desires.

·         New businesses can be noticed by getting into the press by doing and saying controversial things, such as when Ajaz launched an Asian restaurant with a friend and booked Bernard Manning for the launch.

Ajaz encouraged the students in the audience but warned them a degree alone meant nothing. Yorkshire's two richest men, Ken Morrison and Paul Sykes, are not graduates. Nor is Bill Gates or the late Steve Jobs.

Ajaz lamented the lack of focus on technical skills. Technology should be compulsory on school curricula and Britain needed to produce more engineers, he said. "Britain is being left behind - we are users, but not creators, of technology." Just one of the world's top 100 websites is British - and that's the BBC.

Ajaz is now working on the launch of Legal 365, a business aiming to exploit "Tesco's Law" which opens up the legal market. Legal 365 will offer fixed-price legal services online and from high street shops. Out goes legal jargon - in a plain English retail approach to wills and divorces.

I can't see it myself ... but that's the point. To Ajaz its obvious - it's an industry ripe for re-invention. Who would bet against Ajaz being the entrepreneur to re-invent it?

Oh, and by the way, what was Ajaz's last job with Dixons before the Freeserve adventure? Manager of PC World in Hull! Yet another example of great things coming out of our city.