Configur Academy - Summer Term, Week 2

Dear Parents,

This is Orgesa from Configur Academy. We are now two sessions into Young Founders House and a couple of weeks into the second term of Rise to Lead, so I wanted to take a Friday afternoon to sit down and tell you properly what has been happening in both rooms and what is coming up.

I was genuinely curious to see how the first session would land, because asking children to spend an hour thinking about money, profit and what it takes to build something of their own is not the most obvious way to spend a Thursday afternoon. What I got was disagreement, back-and-forth, and children who were prepared to say out loud when they thought someone else in the room had got it wrong, which is exactly the kind of room you want when you are trying to teach something that matters.

We spent the first session working through the four jars, Spend, Save, Give and Invest, and rather than defining them the way a textbook would, I told a story for each one and let the children work out what it meant for themselves.

The second session was all about profit, and I decided to keep it as simple as I possibly could. I brought in a children's juice and held it up at the front of the room, and asked them what would happen if I bought it for £2 and sold it for £5. They got there immediately. Then I asked what would happen if I sold it for £1 instead, and there was a pause before one of them said, you lost money. From there, we had a real conversation about why the price you put on something is one of the most important decisions you will ever make as a founder, and a juice carton and the right question turned out to be more than enough to get us there.

Most of the children now have a reasonably clear sense of what they would like to sell at the market, and a few are still turning the question over, which is absolutely fine because there is no pressure to land on the final answer yet. If your child is still thinking it through and you would like something to help, just reply to this email, and I will send you a short playbook, a single page of questions that tends to help children arrive at a clearer idea when they sit down with it at home.

The first Young Founders Market is on Sunday 7 June, 12:00–2:00 pm at The Patch, 42 York Street, Twickenham, and children should arrive at 11:30 am to set up their stalls. We will begin packing down at 2:00 pm and should be finished by about 2:30 pm. A fuller briefing will go out closer to the date, but do put it in the diary now because the weekends in June have a way of filling up quickly.

Second terms have a quality of their own that you cannot manufacture. The children already know the room, they know each other, and they walk in with an ease that a new starter would take weeks to find, and it changes what you are able to do with them almost from the first session.

In Session 2, the children learned three different ways to open any speech, because how you begin a piece of public speaking tends to decide whether anyone bothers listening to the rest of it. The first is a bold statement, which is when you walk up to the front and say something decisive and clear, with no hesitation and no warming up. The second is a question, which pulls the audience in before you have even made your own point, because a good question gets people thinking before you have said anything particularly interesting yourself. The third is a picture in words, which is when you describe a scene so clearly that the audience is already in

side it before you have explained what you are actually talking about.

Once we had worked through all three with plenty of examples, the children used one of them immediately in that session's challenge: invent a school from scratch. A name, three rules, and one subject every child in the country would have to study. The Green Team, who have named themselves The Famous Good Guys, won the room, and what stayed with me afterwards was not the ideas themselves but how deliberately the children chose to open their presentations.

We have also started thinking towards the end-of-term showcase, and every child went home last session with a sheet of fifty questions. They are not questions they have to answer; they are prompts designed to help them find a topic that genuinely belongs to them. Something they care about, know well, or have been quietly thinking about for a while and never had an excuse to talk about out loud. The showcase may be done individually or in pairs, depending on the child and their topic, and we will work that out as the term develops.

If your child has lost the question sheet or cannot find it at home, reply to this email, and I will send another one over. In my experience, the best topics do not appear when children are told to pick one; they surface quietly, usually when the child is doing something else entirely, and the sheet is just a way of helping that happen.

Young Founders Market - Sunday 7 June, 12:00–2:00 pm at The Patch, 42 York Street, Twickenham. Children arrive at 11:30 am to set up their stalls.

That is everything from this week. As always, if you have a question about either programme or if there is anything you would like to talk through, you can reply to this email or message me directly on 07414 962803.

Have a lovely weekend.

Orgesa
Founder, Rise to Lead
Configur Academy
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