How do you teach Entrepreneurship? NLCS Ideas Hub Substack, Vol 10, December 2025
An innovation in education Substack from North London Collegiate School to share our practices and ideas. Editor: Robin Street, Director of Innovation
Can curriculum innovation be both rigorous and genuinely relevant? Surge proves it’s possible
What happens when 90% of Year 12 volunteer for a 9 week entrepreneurship programme —and attendance is impeccable?
From mindset to pitch deck: How business leaders and educators collaborated to build something unique
Plus: VEX robotics expands to Junior School, Ethics Cup success, and AI Driving Licences rolling out across 400+ students
Curriculum Innovation: From Principle to Practice
By Robin Street, Director of Innovation
The Curriculum Innovation strand of the Ideas Hub encompasses some of our most complex work—from integrating AI literacy across year groups to exploring interdisciplinary approaches that maintain academic rigour, and from working with departments like Computer Science on cutting-edge content to asking fundamental questions about what students need to learn for the world they’ll inhabit. One of the biggest questions we’ve tackled this year has been: how and why should we teach entrepreneurship?
Innovation in education—let alone curriculum innovation— risks being vague, overly complex, or lacking in purpose. Many talk about the need to ‘innovate the school curriculum’; without planning to ensure that it is sustainable, authentic, and rigorous. That was the challenge we set ourselves with Surge, our entrepreneurship programme for Year 12 students.
Below, Hanisha— who led the designing and delivering of the programme —shares the detailed journey of what we built and why it resonated so powerfully with students and business partners alike. Before that, a few reflections on what this experience has taught us about curriculum innovation more broadly, because the principles that made Surge work apply far beyond entrepreneurship education.
The student response exceeded anything we anticipated. A course we imagined might interest 20 or 30 students attracted more than 90% of the Year 12 cohort, with full attendance throughout—entirely voluntary, with no formal accreditation. That alone told us something important about relevance, motivation, and student appetite for this kind of learning.
The Design Challenge
There’s an inherent tension between rigour and relevance in curriculum design. Schools rightly prioritise intellectual depth and structured progression, but the world beyond school demands practical skills, adaptive thinking, and real-world application. Surge required us to resolve this tension in practice rather than in theory.
The problem we wanted to address was both real and pressing: young women continue to face barriers in business leadership and entrepreneurship. Teaching this well meant confronting those challenges directly through authentic engagement with how business actually works, rather than relying on theoretical discussion alone.
The turning point came through genuine partnership between education and business. Rather than schools attempting to interpret what the “world of work” needs, we asked directly: Which skills matter? What kinds of understanding make a meaningful difference early on? This clarity enabled us to design something deliverable within a school setting while ensuring students engaged with current, relevant ideas delivered by professionals actually working in those fields.
What Made It Possible
Several factors proved crucial. We used team teaching, bringing together internal expertise and external business leaders. We made deliberate use of the Ideas Hub’s collaborative spaces to create an environment that felt appropriately professional. Sessions were structured to encourage active questioning rather than passive reception.
Assessment choices were equally intentional. No homework. No formal grades during the programme. Students attended because they recognised purpose and value, not because assessment structures compelled them. This wasn’t about lowering expectations—it was about trusting that genuinely meaningful curriculum creates its own motivation.
There were also practical challenges. Fitting new curriculum into an already demanding Year 12 schedule required careful negotiation with pastoral leadership. This wasn’t innovation imposed from above; it was a collaborative development that respected existing structures while still pushing boundaries thoughtfully.
Designed to Scale
From the outset, we wanted Surge to be adaptable and shareable, not a boutique programme dependent on unique conditions. The core structure—focused sessions building from problem identification through to pitch delivery—does not require exceptional resources. The curriculum content, partnership model, and assessment philosophy can be adopted and adapted by others.
Surge has shown us that designing genuinely innovative curriculum requires meaningful partnerships, practical delivery mechanisms that work within school constraints, trust in students to engage when they see genuine value, and a willingness to experiment while maintaining rigour. These are lessons learned through practice, not theory.
Everyone talks about the importance of forward-looking curriculum. It’s easy to say. Doing it well requires ingredients that matter more than we realised when we began. Surge has shown what becomes possible when schools create the conditions for genuine curriculum innovation—and we’re committed to sharing that learning openly.
Why we built Surge
Hanisha Kotecha, Director of Marketing and External Relations,
Surge really began in a conversation between Robin, Vicky and I about wanting to teach students about entrepreneurship in a way that felt serious, modern and worthy of their ambition, and from there it grew into a much bigger question about what our Sixth Form experience should feel like. From the academic side there was a clear desire to give the girls a proper grounding in entrepreneurial thinking, while from my side, coming into school life after years in agencies working on national and global brands, I was thinking like a marketer who knows how to build something that is genuinely compelling for a specific audience. I kept looking at Sixth Form as a product in its own right and asking whether our offer was as strong as it could be, not only in terms of subjects and facilities but in terms of the atmosphere, the access, the pace and the sense of possibility wrapped around it, and a lot of what has made Surge work in the way it has comes directly from that commercial experience of designing things carefully and then actually getting them off the ground.
It felt obvious that if you arrive in our Sixth Form with strong grades and big ambitions, you should get something that money cannot easily buy, something that only a school with our people and networks can realistically offer. Similarly, one of the big gaps for women is not ideas or work ethic, it is access to networks and the confidence to use them. NLCS has an alumnae community that is almost absurdly strong, Old North Londoners sit in serious roles across law, media, tech, finance, medicine, the arts and the charity world, and many of them will tell you that being an ONL is a thread that runs through their whole life, yet the wider picture is still bleak, with only a tiny fraction of equity investment in the UK going to back female founders while all male teams receive the vast majority of venture capital.
There is a real tension in that; our students are sitting on top of an extraordinary network, but you do not automatically grow up knowing that it is yours to lean on, and meanwhile men have been very comfortable using networks for decades to get backing, jobs and second chances. Surge was our attempt to push back against that, long before anyone has written a pitch deck, to get the girls thinking about where and how to build relationships now so that they have people in their corner before they even have an idea. We are not trying to turn every student into a start-up founder (although, take a moment to imagine what that could look like!), what we are trying to do is help them learn to spot problems or gaps, feel entitled to ask questions and know how to do something about what they see, whether that ends up being a business, a campaign, a charity or a change they make from the inside.
The name itself came quite quickly. Surge links straight back to our school promise of Making Waves since 1850, it feels like the moment when a wave starts to build, the point at which something begins to move. By definition, a surge is a sudden powerful forward or upward movement, which felt exactly right for a programme that is meant to be the start of something powerful in their lives. So the bare bones of Surge as our start-up academy for Sixth Form came together, a nine week experiment where 89 Year 12 students would learn to think like founders and to feel at ease stepping into rooms full of investors, strategists, creatives and operators, seeing those spaces as places they can inhabit in future, whatever direction their careers eventually take.
Turning a year group into a tribe
From the beginning, we were as interested in belonging as we were in business models. Year 12 life is full of small, specialist classes, you might see the same eight people in Politics and a different ten in Chemistry, but you rarely get to work as a whole year group, and Surge changed that. For nine weeks they were shuffled into new combinations, solving problems, debating over ideas, testing things and presenting to each other, and you could see quite quickly that the year was bonding in a way that does not really happen through the normal sixth form timetable.
We nudged that along in some very deliberate ways. Every student received a Surge journal, a place to jot down the many words of wisdom they heard, the ideas that landed, the questions that would not go away and the advice that helped them make sense of it all, those pages are already becoming a small record of how their thinking is shifting over time. The brand looks and feels like a cooler cousin of the main school identity, so you can spot a Surge slide or poster instantly, and the hoodies and medals are not just merch, they give them a shared identity; you can already see the hoodies being worn around school with a certain amount of pride and I suspect we will be seeing them, and the friendships and memories behind them, for quite some time.
We also paid attention to the way the experience felt from the moment they walked into a session. There was music and video content about Surge playing as the girls arrived, the now iconic iced gingerbread drinks and elderflower fizz waiting in the Parthenon Cafe, and a general sense that this hour of their week was going to be different from their usual timetable. We deliberately did not overload them with pre work or homework, there were no problem sets to complete afterwards, just an invitation to come to the session, listen hard, ask good questions, take what they needed and let the ideas breathe a little in their journals and conversations. Alongside that, we shared highlights on social media and encouraged detailed write ups from the girls themselves on LinkedIn, so they could start to see that platform as somewhere they are allowed to put their own thoughts and content into the world. All of that, from the music to the snacks to the posts and reflections, made the programme feel special and slightly separate from the rest of school life, and helped them feel proud of Surge and a real sense of ownership over it, as if they were part of something bigger that they were helping to build.
Learning from people who are actually doing it
I was very clear, and quite stubborn, that Surge could not just be a sequence of adults delivering theoretical talks about entrepreneurship, and if we were going to ask a bunch of busy year 12 students to give up their time and attention, every session had to earn its place. Right at the start, ONL Rupal Kantaria helped Robin and I shape the curriculum and gave us a simple bedrock to build on, every part of Surge should empower, equip and engage. With support from Sonal Sachdev Patel and Priya Lakhani, we turned that into three quiet tests that sat behind the whole programme, empower was about mindset and belief, helping the girls to see what they might be capable of, equip was about giving them practical tools, frameworks and skills they could actually use and apply, and engage was about thinking carefully about audiences, how to speak so that people really listen and hear you, how to tell a story clearly and how to connect with the right people in the right ways.
Across the programme, more than a dozen experts and partners came in to work with the girls, and each week was shaped to show a slightly different piece of what it means to start something, grow something or simply look at your work with an entrepreneurial lens. We started with mindset, because there is little point talking about equity splits if the voice in your head is telling you that you are not that kind of person. ONL and charity CEO Sonal Sachdev Patel spoke very honestly about not becoming your own saboteur and about the emotional rollercoaster that our students already sit on, from the days when you quietly question your contribution to the days you feel unstoppable, which is not dissimilar to the two extremes most founders will recognise in themselves. Beth Horn, now VP for Europe at Pinterest, talked about being a builder, about the pivots in her own career from drama student to big tech, and about the fact that the job she has now did not exist when she left school, which was a useful reminder that at 17 you do not need a fully mapped out plan, but you do need to back your ability to adapt and to keep learning.
Then we moved into the nuts and bolts or oats and pots… ONL founder Lauren O’Donnell from Oatsu and Riya Patel from All The Aunties showed how paying close attention to something as mundane as a supermarket shelf can lead you to a genuinely interesting gap, and how that can grow into a real business, complete with failed products, successful ones, investor conversations and the slightly surreal experience of seeing your brand in a fridge in Waitrose. Vicky Bingham talked about teams and people, how you build around your own gaps, how you work out what motivates different personalities, and why that matters just as much as your numbers.
Amber Nasir from Vestd took the students into the world of ownership and equity. It was probably the most technical session of the programme, but the girls rose to it, and through a simple game that fast forwarded them five years and added a few zeros to their imaginary valuations, they suddenly found themselves making very grown up decisions about who they would want to share their company with and on what terms.
Oliver Wyman then created something really special for them through the support of ONLs Nikki Davis and Rupal Kantaria, both partners at the firm. They invited us into their Baker Street office, we took just under 90 students on the Tube and suddenly our girls were sitting in a large meeting room with consultants who had cleared time in their diaries just to help them think. Each group had its own consultant and a strategy map for a women’s health product, based on Oliver Wyman’s IP, which broke the component parts of a strategy into questions, who are your customers, what is your value proposition, who are your key partners, what are the costs, how do you make money, how will you reach people, what are your dependencies etc. For most of them, this was the first time they had been asked to think that way; they picked it up quickly, worked (in teams) through the map with their own product ideas, refining them with their consultant and then presented back to each other. Watching them stand up, explain their thinking and take questions in front of their peers felt just as important as the strategy content itself.
Later in the programme, Orr Vinegold from Unrest and founder Brittany Boeckle from Knack Snacks came in and quietly blew up the way we think about pitching. Rather than heading straight to a boardroom moment with slides, they pulled it all the way back to something very simple, how you introduce yourself. It sounds basic, but we know that a lot of decisions are made in those first conversations, over coffee, in corridors, at events. The girls practised introducing themselves as if they were meeting family offices, angels investors or venture capitalists, and you could see the difference when they silenced their inner saboteurs and simply said who they were, what they cared about and asked for what they needed.
Branding day with Lori Meakin from adam&eveDDB was, selfishly, my favourite. She gave them a short but powerful talk on branding and explained how much impact branding can have on the success of a product. She then tasked them with three completely different briefs and very little time, and within minutes they were writing positioning statements, pulling together brand world moodboards, working out who each product was for and what it would say about the person who bought it. The kind of work that would usually take an agency weeks appeared on tables in about twenty minutes, which I am still slightly in awe of.
Near the end we heard from Priya Lakhani, whose own story runs from selling chocolate bars at school to building Century Tech, always with a very clear sense of purpose around access to education. Her message was once you find a problem you cannot ignore, you will keep going until you move something, which is very much the muscle we are trying to build with Surge and a fitting embodiment of that original brief to empower, equip and engage.
Pointing it all at something bigger
We were also determined that Surge would not just trail off into a certificate and a nice group photo, so the final session was a Social Change Challenge Day with a live brief from Noah’s Ark Children’s Hospice.
The girls worked in teams of five or six and were asked to find ways for Noah’s Ark to reach and engage Gen Z supporters. We could not have been prouder of how seriously the girls took on this challenge - discussing what makes their generation give, what puts them off, what feels authentic, what does not, and how you tell the story of a hospice without tipping into either sentimentality or despair. Governors, partners and staff came in as judges and group after group stood up and pulled together everything they had learned about insight, brand, strategy and pitching.
The winning idea, a thrift shop concept for Noah’s Ark that we are now hoping to try out in school, was exactly the kind of thing we had hoped for. It was imaginative, practical, commercially literate and focused entirely on making life a bit better for seriously unwell children and their families. I have to say it made the point better than any speech could have that an entrepreneurial mindset is not only about building the next big company, it is also a very useful way to think when you care about social change.
Helping a year group become a bit of a tribe and creating an experience that feels this rich and intentional is a real privilege, and we are incredibly grateful for the backing and financial support of a handful of very generous parents who have funded Surge this year and beyond, as we start to think seriously about how to scale its impact and growth beyond Canons.
Updates from Across the Ideas Hub
VEX Robotics Continues to Flourish
Our next digital Substack will share more, but with Junior School teachers now trained to deliver VEX, as well as hosting ten schools for events and staff training with the VEX team, we are always happy to support anyone looking to grow robotics in their own school.
Eureka Schools Programme
We’ve updated our Eureka Schools programme website to make it easier for interested schools to sign up for events. Last week’s Ethics Cup was a huge success, and with more than twenty events scheduled for the rest of this year, we look forward to collaborating with more students and staff in the new year.
AI Driving Licence & Teaching Research
Next term, over 400 girls will receive their NLCS Digital Driving Licences, alongside the 20 staff who received theirs this term. We also have 12 staff piloting Co-pilot Premium, whose learning will be shared with colleagues next term. We are delighted to be enrolling our international partner schools as well.
Look out for an announcement next term on a new research project exploring the ingredients of a great lesson.
As always, we welcome colleagues from other schools interested in our work to visit us. Please reach out at ideashub@nlcs.org.uk if you’d like to know more.
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