The Humanities Education Centre, with funding from Tower Hamlets Social Inclusion Fund and the Co-op, has been running a project on co-operative, social enterprise in Langdon Park School.

Langdon Park school council are working with a childrens rights peer trainer, and ex-student of the school, Zina Lewis; a nationally famous training team from Swansea, Dynamix; a local social entrepreneur, Cathy Ward; and Jilla Jamfar the Business Development Manager for Social Enterprise London.

Zina Lewis ran workshops on the reasons why the students had become councillors, and the issues that need to be addressed in the school . A research team of ten students, looking at how representation works, visited the House of Commons to interview their local MP, Jim Fitzpatrick , and the GLA headquarters to question their councillor John Biggs.

Over two days, 16th –17th March, Dynamix worked with Langdon Park School students to transform their council into a co-operative social enterprise. This is part of a national pilot project, CASE4us, funded by Co-op Action that is creating ten case-studies around the country that will feed into the enterprise experience curriculum initiative coming online in all secondary schools in 2005. The aim of the project is to use enterprise as a vehicle for empowering children to take part and manage projects that will contribute to their communities.

On 29th June representatives from the school council attended a national conference to share the processes and outcome of their project, which is also be published on three websites.

The Langdon Park School Council concluded their two day training with a business plan presentation to a panel of four experts from the field of social enterprise, and their headteacher. The panel reviewed the plan and fed back to the council . Quotes from the panel are below.

The implementation of the plan was reviewed by the panel in June.

read more about the project