Breaking the Mould 2010 a triumph

Well what a brilliant day it turned out to be. Breaking the Mould 2010 was a triumph.

Though my fantastic team and I barely had time to draw breath during the conference itself, it seemed that, by and large, the vast majority of the 350 students and teachers who came to the InterContinental on Monday had a great time and went away buzzing with ideas about the world of work.

We had spent all Sunday stuffing goody bags, inserting leaflets into brochures and sorting hundreds of name tags into alphabetical order. And frankly as we finally found our hotel rooms at about midnight with a six o/clock start to look forward to, success seemed a distant prospect. Producing a newspaper from scratch each week was looking like a doddle.

But the day dawned sunny and brilliantly blue – perfect for our guests to look out over Hyde Park at its splendid best. And the possibility that we might be about to pull the whole thing off without mishap slowly became a reality.

I must admit I was amazed at how interested the girls were in everything – many of them were taking notes during the speeches, they flocked to all the exhibition stands over and over again, they bombarded the speakers with questions and our sponsors with requests for work experience and to make visits to their schools. Have a look at the brochure we produced to go with the conference (in the Breaking the Mould part of the site) and you’ll get an idea of the extraordinary top flight range of speakers we organised for the day and get a sense of why the girls were so excited.

Guest appearances from model-turned-entrepreneur Caprice and the classical singing sensation Hayley Westenra added to the glamour of the day which, for some of the delegates, was the first time they had visited
London letalone spent time in one of the Capital’s most sought after hotels.

Needless to say the Formula 1 simulators brought along by the sponsorship team of RBS NatWest drew a constant crowd – but, there again, so did Louise Johnson who spoke about her exciting ’secret’ career looking
after F1 sponsorship within a bank that now sees her jetting around the world and rubbing shoulders with the rich and famous of the motor racing circuit.

There was also a huge buzz around the stunning Rolls-Royce that had ferried apprentice Lauren Norris to the event so she could take part in our opening panel and was parked by the ballroom entrance all day to allow
girls (and me!) quite possibly a once in a lifetime chance to sit in such a vehicle.

The Serious Fraud Office ran a competition on its stand with prizes at the end of the day while Gill Evans from the Metropolitan Police turned up with some of the firearms and other hardware deployed on the streets of
London for the girls to see. I couldn’t get anywhere near the O2 stand to see what was going on as it was perpetually surrounded by students!

As you can see from the brochure we crammed loads into the day and I was extremely grateful that our speakers buried their egos and spoke for only their allotted time so we could keep to a death defyingly tight schedule.

The climax of the day for some of the girls was the final of our MoneySense Financial Mail Apprentice Challenge 2010 in which we gave a prize of £3000 to the winning team from Manchester and £1000 to the three
runners up (details are in Vicki Owen’s report of the day in Financial Mail and elsewhere on the site).

In front of a huge audience the girls showed films professionally taken of their projects by our artistic director Cathy Hassan and then withstood some tough questioning in our very own boardroom from TV’s Apprentice stars, Margaret Mountford, Saira Khan and Tim Campbell, who really put them through their paces.

What was really satisfying though was the number of girls who sought me out to say thank you and tell me what a wonderful time they’d had. And it was so gratifying to hear teachers and our other guests from the Financial Mail Women’s Forum say how much they wished there’d been something like Breaking the Mould when they had been at school.

Satisfying and gratifying enough to do it all over again for Breaking the Mould IV next year? I think I’ll have to consult the women who really deserve the praise for last week: Vicki Owen, Gaynor Pengelly and Jackie Jay.

ALL Breaking the Mould pictures are being added to the FMWF Facebook group – FMWF: Women in Business (click here).

Click here for the brochure: Breaking the Mould 2010 brochure.

Posted by Lisa Buckingham on Sunday, March 7th, 2010 at 9:00 am.

Filed under Breaking the Mould, Events, News, Students, Tagged as: .