Partnerships
A global partnership. A live challenge. Two schools. One world to solve.
Our partnership with the Peter Jones Foundation, UK — one of Britain's most respected entrepreneurship foundations, established by Dragon's Den entrepreneur Peter Jones — is the fullest expression of our belief that the most powerful entrepreneurial education is grounded in genuine problems.
It is not a school exchange. It is not a cultural visit. It is a structured, sustained, globally connected entrepreneurial challenge — in which real students on two sides of the world are solving each other's real community problems, building real startup ideas, and having those ideas validated by the Managing Director of one of the UK's most influential entrepreneurship foundations.
It has been running for more than three months. It is ongoing. And it is producing entrepreneurial thinking that neither school anticipated when it began.
A bilateral exchange — not hierarchical. Both schools give problems. Both schools develop solutions.
Students identify a real problem in their community in the East Midlands — something they live with, something they see every day, something needing a solution that the people closest to it have not yet been able to build.
Drawing on Design Thinking, ESTEAM, Project-Based Learning, and Friday Entrepreneurship Day practice, AWS students from India, Sri Lanka, Lebanon, Spain, UAE and beyond develop genuine startup responses — and share their own community problems back to Leicester College.
There are many international school partnerships. The Global Flash Challenge is different from all of them.
Neither school sets the agenda. Both schools give problems. Both schools develop solutions. The exchange is genuinely equal — and that equality produces a quality of mutual respect one-directional programmes cannot replicate.
The problems are not invented for the exercise. They are real — drawn from the lived experience of real communities on both sides of the world. That rootedness gives the entrepreneurial work a weight abstract briefs cannot provide.
Three months of continuous engagement produces a depth of learning and connection that a one-day hackathon never could. Students who have lived this challenge for three months are different from the students who began it.
Shared meals, informal conversations, moments of humour and discovery — these transform a structured programme into something students carry with them long after the formal challenge has concluded.
Bill Muirhead and the Peter Jones Foundation assess every final idea. The work students produce is judged by someone who knows what entrepreneurial excellence looks like — and whose validation carries real-world weight.
AWS students from Chennai, Sri Lanka, Lebanon, Spain, UAE and online cohorts worldwide bring breadth of cultural perspective that no single-country school could replicate — and vice versa from Leicester.
Managing Director of the Peter Jones Foundation — with the experience, expertise, and institutional authority to assess a student startup idea with the same rigour any serious investor would apply.
This validation is not a formality. It is a genuine assessment — of the problem identified, the solution developed, the entrepreneurial thinking behind it, and the potential it carries.
Bill Muirhead brings to this process the full weight of the Peter Jones Foundation's experience in identifying and nurturing entrepreneurial talent — the same foundation that has helped shape some of the UK's most promising young entrepreneurs over many years.
For an AWS student, receiving validation from the Managing Director of the Peter Jones Foundation is an entry point into a world-class entrepreneurial network — a signal to universities, investors, and future collaborators that the work this young person has done has been assessed at the highest level and found to be worthy of recognition.
A snapshot of the partnership and its current state.
Are you an AWS student who wants to participate in the next cohort? Speak to your Success Coach — and prepare to solve a problem from a community you have never visited, for people you have not yet met, with ideas only you can bring.
