Equity Partnership’s School Network Program

In the Business and Economics Department we are committed to supporting our students to achieve their potential. We are fortunate to be in a position to provide some students with a hands-on opportunity to apply their business-related skills to real-world applications. This will help participants to strengthen their soft skills such as communication and problem-solving and allow them to become innovative entrepreneurs. More importantly, in doing so, they will also be helping underprivileged Thai schools. Therefore, I would like to inform you about the Equity Partnership’s School Network Program that Bangkok Prep will be a part of this academic year.

The Equity Partnership’s School Network Program (EP) is a long-term joint partnership programme between Thai local schools, Thailand international schools, JD CENTRAL, and the Equitable Education Fund (EEF). The purpose of this programme is to lessen the education gap within Thailand and provide the underprivileged Thai schools with the necessary education and opportunity needed to help them develop skills for a sustainable future. With this goal in mind, the Thai schools selected for this programme are schools under the branch of EEF’s support and are schools categorised with the majority of their students living in ‘poverty’ or ‘extreme poverty’. This programme was designed to match students and teachers from diverse backgrounds to design and manufacture products using the resources available to them to be sold through the JD CENTRAL online platform.

Over the nine months of co-creation session between Thai schools and international schools, the Thai schools will be tasked with the responsibility of producing the product while international students will be tasked with the responsibility of marketing and selling the product. With EEF’s support, we hope that both Thai and international students will learn from one another; with the context of exchanging culture and learning practical entrepreneur skills.

The programme is designed to run from Saturday 10, October until the end of March 2021.

• There will also be coaching sessions and workshops provided on the 19/12/2020 and 20/12/2020, which is compulsory for students to participate to learn new skills essential for the business world. These skills include learning how to improve and develop products, how to efficiently increase the sales of a product, how to communicate effectively and clearly, etc.
• Additionally, students are expected to go on a fieldtrip with their respective teams to visit their assigned Thai schools. This is to allow international school students to gain a better understanding of the manufacturing process of their products.
• There are 2 teams from Bangkok Prep and we are paired with Sensirianusorn School based in Buriram province and Watthayang School in Nakhon Sri Thammarat province.

EEF will supply for the transportation cost of the van between the airport to the Thai schools and vice versa, the travel insurance cost, and meals at the Thai school will also be provided. Parents will also be allowed to volunteer to take the team for the field trip if they so desire, however, we would like to ask for parents to keep their intervention at the minimum as we would like this to be a student-led programme. Please note that the cost of the flight, hotel and dinner will need to be self-funded.

Please find the timeline and key activities below:

Throughout the duration of the programme, students will communicate virtually with their team members and their partnered school via LINE, where they will work to support each other and share progress with one another. Each team will have a total of 20,000 baht budget to manage and develop an existing product made by Thai schools, limited to 50 pieces to be sold on JD Central from Monday, 28 December to Thursday, 28 January.

Finally, there will be a contest judging towards the end of the programme. Selected individuals from EEF, JD CENTRAL, and international schools will decide the winner of the competition. The factors that will be taken into consideration of who the winner of this competition will be of these five factors: the final product sale figures, the profit made, the creativity, budgeting and pricing, and teamwork. The winner of this programme will be awarded a trophy that says that they have won the competition (one trophy for each of the Thai and international schools that won the competition). They will also be awarded a letter of recommendation from EEF executives. All of the participants will get a certificate of participation.

Nikita Arora

Business Studies & Travel and Tourism Teacher