Pupils impress judges in tourism Enterprise Challenge

This week saw the finale of the Fifth Form Enterprise Challenge.

Organised by Head of Futures, Chris Wain, our Fifth Form groups presented ideas on how to increase tourism across towns in Shropshire. Among the judging panel were members from ShrewsburyBID, Marches LEP and the School’s own Director of Marketing and Communications, Glyn Ferriday, alongside the High Sherriff of Shropshire, Tony Morris-Eyton.

Sapna C (G, V), a member of the winning team, has reflected on the competition:

Early this week we took part in an enterprise challenge that was set by the High sheriff of Shropshire. Each team was allocated a town within the county and the overall task was to present to a panel of judges our ideas on how to increase tourism in that particular town.

My team was allocated the idyllic town of Oswestry and we had to attempt to show the judges how we would go about increasing tourism there. We first had to research the area and try to find a selling point. We decided to target city dwellers and tried to advertise Oswestry as this hidden gem. We also focused on the fact that it was a convenient stopover for those traveling to Wales. On the next day we had to design a poster and leaflet, write a blog, create a social media campaign and film an advert as well as coming up with a five-minute presentation. All the groups were then pitted against each other in the semi-finals where we had to show our ideas to the allocated judges. The winners of the semi- finals, (Oswestry, Craven Arms and Market Drayton), then when through to the finals to show their presentations to all the judges, where we as Oswestry won.

I found this experience to be rather constructive and beneficial as it required us to work in small groups and it enabled us to improve our entrepreneurial skills as we had to carry out a lot of research and pinpoint the best-selling points of the town. Furthermore, this challenge also improved our time management skills as we were only given a certain amount of time to complete each task. This taught us how to be concise and how to clearly get our points across. Moreover, it was also very useful in enhancing our public speaking skills and we were able to learn how to best present an idea. It is something that I would definitely enjoy doing again in the future as it was an amusing way to develop new skills.