Futures Fair: What will you be?

The Transformation Trust’s beautiful idea played out today at the Wembley SSE Arena. It was an honour to be even a tiny contributor to the Futures Fair.

School’s out forever

We’re practically at the end of another school year. For our y11 children, this represents a pretty big milestone; the first time that their academic results really count and the ‘what next?’ choices really matter.

All across the country, secondary schools are organising trips, events, parties and even proms (yes, proms have somehow seeped into our culture now). But with state school funding continuing to feel the squeeze, it’s fair to say that some of these celebrations will be necessarily less lavish than others.

Rock Assembly

Back in May 2009, the Transformation Trust was launched as an independent education charity, recognising that opportunity, especially in the area of extra-curricular activity, is often denied to children from underprivileged areas. It’s about funding and organising those opportunities, opening doors and unearthing talents.

The trust’s Rock Assembly event is an ambitious attempt to put on the mother of all end-of-year concerts for as many as 10,000 children from across the UK. The guests, presenters and musical line-up continue to get bigger every year and the venue (Wembley SSE Arena) is pretty epic.

Futures Fair

Combined with this unadulterated blow-out of fun, noise and celebration, the organisers cleverly gather together a diverse range of universities and big brand employers in the area outside the venue’s main hall. At this Futures Fair, the children get to explore and talk about post-16 opportunities for further education and employment in the morning before heading in for the concert in the afternoon.

The Futures Fair is where we came in. Our installer was there at 7am to put up a display stand for Anglia Ruskin University. We’ve enjoyed working with Anglia Ruskin at several UCAS open days and fairs across the country this year, and they have made heavy use of our warehousing and logistics service to cope with the regular, repeated nature of these shows and their geographical distribution.

Here, we were tasked with creating another standout space amidst a block of other university stands, the ‘Which? University Village’. With so many children potentially stopping by, it had to be easy and quick to get to the relevant information, so we doubled up on both the literature stands and also the iPad counters, giving 4 active tablets. The backdrop was the same wraparound Twist configuration we used at the fairs. We had everything fully built and ready to go in about 30 minutes.

We’re probably a bit biassed, but we think Anglia Ruskin’s strapline ‘What will you be?’ is absolutely perfect for this event. It’s about empowering children to make those difficult choices and open doors to more possible futures. It looks beyond the vague potentials of ‘What could you be?’ because ‘What will you be?’ also implies decisiveness and positivity; a proactive step in the right direction.

We hope the children attending this year’s event got a lot of useful information at the Futures Fair and had an absolute blast at the Rock Assembly.