“Young Enterprise was founded in 1963 by the late Sir Walter Salomon, based on the American Junior Achievement Programmes. ” Sir Walter Salomon was apparently impressed by the activities of JA, which he observed whilst visiting the US in 1959. He perceived a need to balance the classroom learning with a practical education in business. Somewhere along the line his vision was corrupted and the newly formed YE idea found it way, through much misfortune to Kesgrave High School in Suffolk.

Now Young Enterprise was not always a tale of woe at Kesgrave, in fact in the first few years they had been highly successful – Howard Smith sold some candles and fairy dust, the school received numerous certificates for completion of the course, and the NVQ qualification was obtained by numerous willing students proudly carrying the name of Kesgrave High School into the history books. ESPIRIT in 2000/2001 was a particular success coming an overall 2nd place in the West Suffolk Final, and winning Best Personnel Department in the whole of Suffolk. They have a cabinet – a locked cabinet – full of framed certificates. They even have a rather nice selection of large photographs on a notice board in the Business Studies department, colour photographs at that – not something to be laughed at, but laugh we did. The complacent laugh of imminent downfall one might suggest. I say this because next year it would be our turn to do them proud, and we can all imagine how that one turned out.

It was a long summer’s day in the middle of autumn; Alan and Randall Junior had been pacing up and down the classroom thinking of ingenious ways for us to become better individuals when suddenly it came upon them. Something about creating your own company and designing a product (Young Enterprise) – the original ideas about designing Quake III maps, and carpet bombing the school were soon filtered out until there were no ideas left, however this wasn’t the end. Now anything was possible, more and more people became interested, there was no stopping us – apart from after we’d applied 2 girls were placed in our group, for sake of further argument we shall just call them ‘the limiting factors’.

I’d say the original outlook was something like optimistic, however feelings like that never have lasted and never will. After about a week we were all suicidal directors on power trips. Alan was managing director, Shields was on Sales, James Davey was personnel (something to do with biscuits), Rawson was the finance director, I was ICT Director, Ryan was on marketing and Randall was operations. The limiting factors were the 2 secretaries. Andrew Ainsworth was also a member of the company until a journalist and his camera found their way into the Ainsworth Bondage Supplies warehouse and didn’t come out – and we haven’t heard from Andrew since.

We ended up designing some kind of game, or rather I ended up designing and coding some kind of game. I had also designed the company logo, created the website and thought of the name – Abstract Illusions. Great.

We crumbled like one of James Davey’s digestive biscuits. So did Hardcastle’s group designing T-Shirts. As did Gareth et al, who had the genius idea of running computer courses – I wondered where Gareth is now, somewhere in the middle of nowhere no doubt. Every year Kesgrave High School had a representative in the Suffolk Finals, a long running tradition of which they had been very proud. We were the first year to break this trend. We collapsed part way through the first half of the financial year, and just walked away before the tumbleweed even had time to roll slowly across the screen.

Before this time, Young Enterprise had been very successful at KHS, we ruined this, and it’s going to take a lot of work to ever get back on track. One day I shall ask my fellow ex-directors what they thought of the whole fiasco, but until then; this evaluation is over.

Article Written by Jay