October 23, 2018, by The Ingenuity Lab

Think For The Future- Reducing Challenging Behaviour One Child at a Time

Ingenuity19 is looking for the next generation of entrepreneurs and innovators to create scalable social and commercial enterprises that can transform Nottingham, the UK and beyond.

We are looking for students, staff, graduates and early career researchers from across the University of Nottingham to come together and discover problems worth solving, and offer you the tools to create scalable sustainable solutions.

Today though, we sat down with Director of Think For The Future, Cherie White for a quick coffee…

I became interested in the mix between business and social impact and how the two can be twinned together. After working on a project at the University of Nottingham I discovered that Nottingham City secondary schools at the time were being ranked as the second worst in the country which motivated me to try and set up a social project to see if we could help contribute to improvements in the education system. From here the project snowballed into a social enterprise that now generates revenue based on social outcomes that have been achieved.

As an organisation, our social mission is to reduce challenging behaviour in schools and therefore reduce exclusions from main stream education, allowing an increase in positive behaviours  and equipping for success in and outside of the classroom.

It is lower cost for schools to hire our Behaviour Mentors as we work on a payment by results model meaning schools only pay for the outcomes we achieve. I’d say the biggest example of social impact we’ve noticed is a reduction in permanent exclusions at school. The model is so sustainable because schools pay for our programmes based on cost savings we achieve.

Our top piece of advice for someone looking to set up a social enterprise would be to make sure you spend time testing your market, thus making sure what you are doing can be financially sustainable.

Official Ingenuity 19 applications will be open in November.

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