An unusual request came my way, to construct a slide pack drawn from the GCSE Business syllabus but focused on helping prisoners in English jail get started as business entrepreneurs on release. A fellow consultant gave me seven business themes, such as Marketing and Finance, provided by the IOEE Institute of Enterprise and Entrepreneurs, to work up into coherent multi-media lessons (and he would do the in-house training).

It was a fascinating exercise and to tackle it I had to imagine how someone with a difficult background could turn a start-up into a successful business – what sort of skills and abilities they would need, how they would obtain finance, form stakeholder relations, how they would negotiate deals – and of course which business laws are important. As well as teaching the basics, for instance financial reporting and calculations, the marketing mix, ownership options, advertising and market research techniques, organisation structure and quality and customer satisfaction.

I created a slidepack for each theme and starter, plenary and interactive quiz. In the slides I included many short case studies and enhanced these with on-line links to videos and articles. This aspect was fascinating, because with the package to be used in prison I was given a web address restriction of one source only – the BBC. But I discovered a host of great short stories on line within the BBC’s CEO secrets, their Business pages, the Dragons’s Den, and of course Bitesize.

These videos varied from business lessons from well know celebrities like Baroness Karen Brady, Levi Roots, Lord Alan Sugar to the rags to riches, start up to multinationals like Deliveroo and Brewdog; the charming story of rapper Labrinth taking two teenagers to an East End market stall to learn the art of selling; the man who converted his grandma’s jam recipe to an international business; the inspiring stories of start-ups surviving and thriving in the Pandemic and opening zero-waste Green businesses.

I put a lot more time into these than the financial reward justified but as a philanthropic work it was justified and with a little alteration I’ve made the package suitable for any Business Studies student – for instance I’ve already used them to teach a Chinese business student – and made them available in my TES shop.

When I first started tutoring with simple Maths I didn’t realise the interesting avenues down which it would take me!