The Nspire Programme

What would it look like if we taught young people to build a business, make money, and create wealth, while also showing them how to cook, get a stain out of a shirt, hold their own in a workplace, and stand out in a competitive market when they might have the grades everyone else does?

Nspire does just that. Using our lived and professional experience, we built the Bee-coming Curriculum, applied across every Nspire strand a Bee can choose, in a subject area they actually care about. This generation isn’t like the ones before it. They’re not signing up to sit in jobs they hate for thirty years just to keep the lights on, and honestly, we respect that.

So our job is to make sure they’ve got the skill, the knowledge, and the confidence to go after everything they want, on their own terms, but with a plan in place and a system for overcoming challenges.

Whichever strand you pick, the programme builds towards 3 qualifications in one journey, and Bees build a portfolio at the same time.

Forget a participation certificate. Through our City & Guilds and ILM Approved Centre status (Centre 075135), every Bee earns the Level 1 Award in Personal and Social Skills, the Level 2 Award in Employability Skills, and a Level 3 Extended Project Qualification worth up to 28 UCAS points, qualifications that can open doors.

Consistent, trauma-informed mentoring throughout the journey, not a one-off workshop and a goodbye.

Selling at a market stall. A studio recording. A live performance with their name on it, for a real audience.

This is the engine behind every strand. Built on lived and professional experience, the Bee-coming Curriculum moves every Bee through three stages: Find, Build, Become.

Bees explore their strand, discover what they’re actually good at, and figure out where their interest could go.

Bees put it into practice, developing the real technical skill and industry knowledge that strand demands.

Bees take what they’ve built and put it out into the world, qualification in hand, ready for what’s next.

Every stage is mapped to the Skills Builder Universal Framework, so the employability skills Bees are developing along the way, things like teamwork, problem solving, and communication, are tracked and recognised, alongside the qualification.

A care-experienced young person is far more likely to end up NEET, not in education, employment, or training, than almost any other group in the country, and this is not because they’re not capable.

We know what that feels like, because some of us lived it. Growing up in care, growing up estranged, growing up being told what you’ll probably never be before anyone bothered to ask what you actually wanted.