Voices
Lisheen National School is located eight miles west of Skibbereen, the small west Cork town with a population of less than 3,000. The school is modern but small.
It has three main classrooms, three mainstream teachers, and excellent facilities and supports for children with additional learning needs.
Earlier this year, 26 of its pupils, all aged between ten and 13, began working on a new project.
The children had learned that carrageen moss, found in abundance from the nearby strand, was an antioxidant, and had smoothing and moisturising properties. And the more they thought about it, the more they realised that those properties could be used to make soap.
Draíocht na Mara, a natural, organic seaweed soap business, was born.
For seed capital, the primary school children borrowed €300 from the school’s Parents’ Association, and quickly turned the classroom into a science lab to start product development.
Business plans and marketing strategies were developed, while customer research was conducted. A brand was built from scratch.
The result? Draíocht na Mara grossed sales of €2,160 and made a profit of €1,350 (the Parents’ Association got its seed capital back).
With their profits, the children went to Baltimore for pizza and ice cream and bought Skibbereen Gift Vouchers to spend in local businesses. They made a donation to charity, and now plan to buy chickens and a coop for the school.
In addition to the money, they also picked up a prize, with the school winning Class of the Year 2024 in the All-Island Junior Entrepreneur Programme Awards.
More than 400 schools across the island of Ireland entered the awards this year, with 12,000 children participating.
The entries varied from children’s books to Tumbling Paddies-themed mugs – and much more besides. There was a wellness festival, a travel kit for children to keep them entertained on long journeys, and a hair bow accessories business.
Niamh McCarthy, the teacher who led the project at Lisheen National School, said all of the children grew from the programme. “Children who aren’t suited to book learning, those who are highly academic, children who are very creative – there’s something for everyone, and it has been such a pleasure to watch them all flourish,” she said.
The Junior Entrepreneur Programme (JEP) has been led by Jerry Kennelly, the serial entrepreneur from Co Kerry, following an experimental pilot created a collaboration with MTU and Shannon Development. The scheme was launched back in 2010, when the economy was in tatters, to foster entrepreneurship among students.
It started in his home county before Kennelly cajoled members of the EY Entrepreneur of the Year network (Kennelly is a former winner of the award, and spent a lengthy period on the judging panel) to roll out the schemes in other counties. Under this model, it penetrated 23 counties.
Kennelly secured some minor support over the years but acted as its financial backstop, using his own resources to ensure it kept going. “We have always been lean in terms of how we run it,” he told me (Kennelly, a photographer by trade, even takes the photos of the winning entrants himself).
Eventually, Kennelly and Marie Lynch, another co-founder of the programme who has been instrumental in its development as managing director, centralised its organisation back to Killorglin.
Four years ago, Enterprise Ireland came on board as a backer under its Primary Schools Entrepreneurship Initiative.
In total, more than 112,000 children have entered the scheme since its inception.
“In my day, kids worked in family businesses or during the summer. This does not happen as much now,” Kennelly says. “This helps children with their self-development. They can figure out what they are good at. Some kids might not be academic, but this gives them other ways to shine. They might be good at sales, at negotiation, at being creative.”
The programme is about much more than just the awards.
Marie Lynch explains that children are taught about entrepreneurship in the classroom, and introduced to local entrepreneurs. Pupils brainstorm, pitch their ideas to a panel of Dragons and choose the project that they’re going to turn into reality.
They have to identify their talents to decide who does what, survey and research their idea and their target market.
Lynch said that the type of businesses being pitched tended to replicate what was going on in the world. During the pandemic, a lot of businesses focused on health and mental wellbeing. Increasingly, businesses are looking at sustainability and nature, she says. “Demand for the programme is massive,” she says. “And it is a programme, not just a competition.”
Both Kennelly and Lynch stress that the programme is complementary to the school curriculum, as opposed to a distraction (there is also a 71-page manual to help teachers navigate the programme).
“It helps with science, with maths, with English,” Lynch said. “This is something that we keep hearing back from teachers. It also helps children understand money, and the idea of risk and reward.”
While the programme is active in the North, it does not have a partner or a sponsor there, something that Lynch is keen to address in the future.
The world, and Ireland, has changed dramatically since Kennelly and Lynch conceived the idea for the programme back in those dark days of 2010.
But the idea behind it – to teach the skills of business and entrepreneurship to young children – remains as relevant today as it was 14 years ago.
If anything, in a world of rapid transformation and technological advancement, it is more relevant than ever.
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