Staff at Newcastle City Learning offer practical opportunities for ESOL students to develop business and enterprise skills.

Managers at NCL were aware that several learners were keen to become self-employed and set up their own micro-enterprises so came up with the idea of running a Christmas Market at the Westgate campus to test out such an opportunity and teach enterprise skills. Liaison with a range of agencies, including Trading Standards and JCP, successfully resulted in planning for an on-site market which took place in mid-December 2015 for the first time and was widely promoted across the city, including via social media. There have been 13 markets since and it has grown to about 30 stalls. More than 100 learners have participated.

Many of stalls are taken up by ESOL learners, but also by students with learning difficulties and/or disabilities, and other learners and a range of goods are sold – from food to jewellery to clothes.

A pre-event session, preparing would-be vendors for the market, is held some two weeks before the event and covers basic marketing principles, self-employment and the law, and signposting where to go in Newcastle for more help with business set-up.

Learners wanting to sell food are required to have Food Hygiene training which the college offers and they prepare and store the food on the college premises, with the cookery tutor supervising food preparation on the day. We also used the market as a focus for class-based activities on business communications, promotion and publicity. Tutors continue to provide support, but really it has become a learning-through-action project.