The schools programme have had the honour of being able to engage with schools across the world - our most inspiring experience was in a small school in Angola where we engaged with a group of 15 year olds around the theme of empathetic leadership. Having been brought up in a rigid and highly authoritative hierarchy where men generally assumed the traditional leaderhsip roles, the students developed skills in empathetic-driven decision making, focussed on a more communal leadership approach. The kids grew in confidence across the day, supporting each other and understanding the power of active listening, putting themselves in other people's shows and listening to success stories from business leaders that had embedded this into their day to day work ethic. Each student also heard from global founders, developing for themselves a global vision too, enhancing their horizons and building confidence along the way. The school commended the team with 100% feedback and we are now looking at opening the programme up to other years. Off the back of this session, we met with the Angolan ministry of education to source ways of embedding the programme into the national curriculum once piloted. We are now working with potential sponsors such as Africell to see whether they will sponsor a 2-year pilot across Angola with the aim of then expanding across Europe and West Africa.

A significant learning was to engage from the get-go with local educators to fully understand cultural nuances and etiquette across the schools. Our approach had been to bring in local founders but the key learning was to invite them to co-create the programmes to ensure maximising impact across the entire programme rather that assuming that the model will fit the audience's needs. WIth this new approach, our programmes have met the audience where they are and inspired them to a much greater level.

Another learning for the leadership team was humility; the realisation that throughout programmes we would learn more about ourselves and our programme too - this mutually benefical acceptance allowed the team to better streamline the programme and to walk the talk better through empathetic leadership, The true value of partnership was learn through accepting that we were in a fortunate position of being able to learn and improve through the confidence of youth, and the drive that young people demonstrate, a power that inspired the entire team throughout.

A final learning is to broaden income streams earlier on. A problem we are experiencing in the UK is the added VAT fees to private schools with the change of government which means that budgets are stretched. We have added educational foundations and corporate sponsors as well as scanning government grant opportunities in order to be able to continue to offer the same programme to non fee-paying schools as well as others, ensuring equality and equity across every aspect of the programme.

We are truly excited (and somewhat astonished!) at the potential to roll out the programme across schools in the UK, Europe and our international chapters. We are leaning in to our USPs of social sciences, and mission-driven expertise and the international network we are part of to create specialist, relevant and much-needed educational content that not only fills a gap in the current curriculum but provides opportunities to enrich and redesign the status quo. We have recently agreed with government of Monaco to explore using the country's education system as a proof of concept and are in talks with the UK government as they conduct a review of the entire UK curriculum. We are also working with the UWC teams to explore how to broaden and improve the International Baccalaureate, globally. Our next steps are to recruit apprentices from the schools we have worked with, to build the team and to develop the content of our programmes with more in-house LSE research. One of of our dreams now is to bring together all of our findings and learnings with our impact stories and to run a global summit on the subject of entrepreneurial education and building our young people up through mission-driven ideation.