As you are probably aware our school has been involved with Junior Entrepreneur Programme for the last 3 years. The Junior Entrepreneur Programme or JEP as it’s known, was created to allow primary school pupils in Ireland the opportunity to embrace entrepreneurship as part of their formative education. Children use their creativity to come up with individual business ideas, they come together as a class to choose one idea and then work to turn this idea into reality.

The path to entrepreneurial experience leads from:
• learning what it is to be an entrepreneur
• identifying the characteristics needed to be an entrepreneur
• researching key business terms such as market research, identifying gaps in the market, product or service development, sourcing suppliers, marketing, advertising, budgeting, managing and business expansion
• dealing with problems that may arise in company development
• delegating responsibilities within a team
• working effectively as a team
• enjoying the rewards of the experience!

In order to facilitate this journey, we have been lucky to have many exciting opportunities this year.

We have worked extensively in the classroom on learning about entrepreneurs, market research, company structure and business development.

Prior to our Easter break, we were delighted to welcome a local entrepreneur to our class to speak to us about the advantages and disadvantages of setting up a business. Mary Murphy, owner of Gymboree Mayo gave us great insight into her business journey. She has set up two businesses over the past few years and was very informative and enthusiastic in her delivery to the class.

Mary returned to participate in the Dragons Den activity, designed to choose the final business idea for the class to work on in the coming weeks. She was joined by Fr. Johnson, Mrs McDonagh and Ms. Heverin. The standard of business ideas, research and presentation skills of the students was reported by all of the “Dragons” as commendable. They found it very difficult to decide on an eventual winning team due to the potential of all of the children’s ideas.

We are so grateful to Mary for giving so willingly of her time and experience to help the children in their JEP preparation. We also thank Fr. Johnson for participating in this thrilling day with the students.

Finally please keep an eye out for our students who will launch their exciting projecr in the coming week!