Business Class and The Radcliffe School

What we did

Home Retail Group is the lead Company in Milton Keynes for Business in the Community’s flagship programme - ‘Business Class’ . Business Class aims to develop sustainable partnerships between school and business within clusters across the country and each company within the cluster is partnered with a local secondary school. Activity is rooted in the needs of the school across four core areas: leadership and governance, enterprise and employability, curriculum support and wider issues.

We will be working with the Radcliffe School over the next three years to help them achieve some of their key objectives.

One of the areas where the school required support was in raising their profile within the local community and they were keen to host a school production - something that hadn’t been done for several years. The challenge was presented to a group of our highest potential colleagues whose development course included supporting a local community project. The group of colleagues used their own experience as well as drawing on their contacts across the business to ensure the school’s production of ‘We Will Rock You’ played to a full house every night and made a profit for the school.

Why we did it

The ‘Business Class’ programme focuses on building sustainable partnerships between schools and businesses. The production of ‘We Will Rock You’ not only provided our colleagues working on the project with the opportunity to make a difference but also engaged other teams at our head office – the students spent a day at our photographic studio on a photo shoot and also visited our offices to give colleagues an all singing and dancing taster of their production to boost ticket sales. The project provided our colleagues with a practical and meaningful opportunity to add real value to the school and the lives of the young people involved in the production.

How we did it

The project leader at the school presented the challenge to our group of colleagues and gave them just two months to deliver a successful and profitable school production for the first time in several years. The group allocated themselves tasks based on their own area of expertise and also made the decision to host a Home Retail Group staff-only night to help engage our colleagues and build our relationship with the school.

The professional promotional material helped to successfully promote the event to staff, parents and families and the show was a sell-out every night.