Over the last 10 years, The Inspirational Learning Group (TILG) has engaged with over 500,000 young people across the UK and their flagship challenge, The National Careers Challenge (TNCC), has been delivered to 500 schools.
The annual grand finals event sees winning teams from each school compete to be crowned TNCC national finalists. This year’s challenges were sponsored by Air Products, Thorpe Park, and NatWest, with NOCN as the official skills partner for the challenge.
Following virtual finals in 2020 and 2021, TILG was determined to make the 10th finals bigger and better than ever before with the last face to face finals held in 2019 at the iconic Wembley Stadium.
On 7thJuly, 1,000 students descended upon The ICC armed with life size prototypes, musical instruments, and fancy dress to ensure that their ideas would stand out from the crowd and would ultimately achieve TNCC champions status! Each team faced a panel of esteemed business professionals who shortlisted two teams per year group, who presented their pitches again, this time in front of all attendees and a panel made up of representatives from each of the sponsors and Nick Jenkins!
Co-founder of TNCC Ben Dyer said, “We were delighted to be at The ICC to celebrate the achievements of the students that have taken part in the TNCC challenge this year. We would like to thank our 21-22 challenge sponsors; Air Products, Thorpe Park and NatWest, who have supported TNCC and students during this academic year. This year’s final absolutely lived up to the promise of an event not to be missed and we were blown away by the standard of the students’ pitches – they get better each year!”.
Lynn Willacy, Community & STEM Ambassador, UK and Ireland at Air Products said “Air Products is very proud to help ‘Inspire the next generation’ by sponsoring The National Careers Challenge again this year. All the finalists who submitted their ideas for the Air Products STEM challenge, which focusses on sustainability, were of such a high standard that our judges found it very hard to choose the overall winner. The range of different and innovative ideas submitted by the students definitely shows that they will be our scientists and engineers of the future. Well done to Walton Priory Middle School who were crowned the overall winners!”
Julie Baker, Head of Enterprise at NatWest said, “NatWest Group is proud to sponsor the National Careers Challenge which brings real-world business skills into schools and gives young people across the country a chance to see where their ideas could take them and what they could achieve. It’s an inspirational initiative that will help make Britain the best country in Europe to start and grow a business. It has been an extremely difficult couple of years for young people across the UK, but through this year’s social enterprise challenge and access to our entrepreneurial skills programme Dream Bigger the finalists demonstrated how society can work, learn and collaborate for the better. I was inspired by the entrepreneurial spirit and innovative ideas that this year’s participants displayed in response to the challenge, and I would like to congratulate them all”
Natalie Dilloway, Head of Marketing at Thorpe Park said, “It’s been an absolute privilege to sponsor the Year 8 National Careers Challenge. I was blown away by the finalists and the amount of hard work and imagination that clearly went in to the entries. I left the event in awe and inspired by all the young minds; the energy, ideas and passion in the room was incredible. Thank you to all the pupils who took the time to enter, the teachers and everyone at The Inspirational Learning Group”.
A huge congratulations to our winning teams;
TNCC Year 7 challenge sponsored by Air Products – Heat Up from Walton Priory Middle School
TNCC Year 8 challenge sponsored by Thorpe Park –Elementals from Rutlish School
TNCC Year 9 challenge sponsored by NatWest –Safe Spots from Altrincham Grammar School for Girls
TNCC Year 10 challenge sponsored by TILG – Around The World in 80 Games from Chesham Grammar School
