We believe that Entrepreneurship Education is the highest-value investment a school can make in students who will go on to employment, further education, or business ownership. Not because it produces entrepreneurs (though it definitely can do that), but because it builds the mindset, social capital, and practical capability that every meaningful career pathway requires.
This conviction is at the heart of the Hynds Foundation Business Academy model. It is born of experience building the model and scaling it to new schools.
The communities we work in share a common characteristic: young people have the drive and talent to succeed, but lack the connections, exposure, and belief that come naturally to those who grow up surrounded by business and professional life. Many students do not have a parent, relative, or neighbour in a career that resembles where they might want to go. The social capital that enables ambition is simply absent.
Entrepreneurship education addresses this deficit directly. It brings the business world into a school, creates genuine relationships between students and practitioners, builds confidence through doing rather than studying, and opens pathways the student did not know existed. Employment follows naturally — not as a separate programme objective, but as an outcome of the broader capability the model creates.
“What was missing for these students was connections to business and careers. Very few of them had family members in a career.” – Salvatore Garguilo, principal at the time of establishing the Manurewa High School Business Academy
The model is built on a clear philosophical position of the Hynds Foundation: to support “New Zealand thriving”. Within the Business Academy model, that translates to every student in a school having access to entrepreneurial learning experiences, because we know every student benefits from the mindset and skills it develops. We are not selecting a cohort. We are creating access across the school community.
The Business Academy model does not sit alongside the school. It works to become part of the school’s identity — visible in the culture, embedded in the curriculum, and evident in where students go next.
The Hynds Foundation Business Academy began not as a model but as a relationship. In 2010, John and Léonie Hynds attended Manurewa High School’s 50th anniversary as alumni, and what they found concerned them: a school full of capable, warm-natured students who had almost no connections to the business and professional world. The gap was not aspiration. It was access.
What followed was an evolving, decade-long commitment that moved through three distinct phases before producing a replicable model.
The first investment was a scholarship to a Year 12 student, Ryan King. That scholarship led directly to King and his classmates entering the Young Enterprise Scheme (YES), forming the Caring and Co Enterprise and producing Unique Drizzle Olive Oil. With strong mentoring from Lance Hutchison and teaching from Emma O’Riordan, the team won YES National Company of the Year and CEO of the Year — the first time Manurewa High had ever achieved this.
This single outcome changed what was possible. The school, its students, and the community saw — perhaps for the first time — that Manurewa High could compete and win in arenas that had previously seemed distant. It created the confidence on which everything else was built.
University of Auckland advisers Mark Bentley and Barry Spicer joined the initiative. A formal governance structure was established in 2015, with founding documents signed between the Business Academy charitable trust and the school’s Board of Trustees. Long-standing partnerships with the University of Auckland Business School, EY, ANZ Bank, and Nestlé were formed. The model began to take shape.
New principal Pete Jones fuelled the focus on “people and programmes”. This period produced the model’s most important structural innovations.
Strategic outcomes were formalised across five areas: business learning, alumni and family connection, pathways to employment, tertiary education and business ownership, and effective partnership management. A Balanced Scorecard was introduced to track progress. A Makerspace was established with support from The Southern Initiative, Ministry for Youth Development, Foundation North, and Auckland Airport Trust.
The results of this period demonstrate what a mature ecosystem produces. A student Future Problem Solving team — John Chen, Okesene Fatu, Aimee Lew and Aaron Lew — reached the international competition in the United States for three consecutive years, placing fourth in the world in 2018. Leanne Gibson (executive director) and Yashna Kumar (student leader) were invited to present at the FabLearn Conference at Columbia University, New York. The Makerspace became a reference site for other South Auckland high schools.
“Future Problem Solving enabled me to see how technology can positively impact the world. What made our journey possible was the work and belief of incredible individuals and organisations.” — John Chen, Manurewa High leaver 2019, now working in the tech sector in Sydney
Social enterprises emerged from the model: Maara Fresh from the community garden, and Manu Toi from the Makerspace. Alumni like Baue Rubeariki, Ryan King, and Paige Dobbs grew into leadership roles within the Academy’s programmes — the clearest evidence that the ecosystem was sustaining itself.
| 12 years of continuous delivery | 7× YES National Finals | 3× Future Problem Solving International appearances | 21 Scholarships awarded to the University of Auckland Business School |
The Manurewa model produced something more valuable than a list of achievements: it produced a tested system with documented success factors and hard-won lessons about what the model actually requires to work.
Replicating a successful school programme is one of the most difficult challenges in education philanthropy. The conventional assumption is that what worked in one school worked because of the specific people in that school, and that those people cannot be replicated. Our experience at Manurewa and Papakura High Schools tests that assumption directly.
Papakura High was selected deliberately. It sits within one of New Zealand’s highest equity index communities, where 15% of 15-to-24 year olds are not in education, employment, or training. The school has strong, committed leadership under principal Simon Craggs, and a genuine desire to change what the school offers its students. Those two conditions — community need and school leadership commitment — are the non-negotiables for this model.
What Hynds Foundation brought to Papakura was not a team of specialists from Manurewa. It brought a system: a Makerspace, a partnership development methodology, a business network, and a programme manager with 12 years of accumulated knowledge about what works and what fails.
In 2025, neither teacher in Papakura’s Business Learning Area had experience with Young Enterprise, very little knowledge of business activities, and no prior experience working with business partners. The ecosystem infrastructure carried the model through its first years — not individual teacher expertise.
This is the critical replication insight. A programme that depends on exceptional individual teachers cannot scale. A programme that depends on an ecosystem — Makerspace, partners, a dedicated programme manager, curriculum knowledge, and a partnership network — can be installed and operated in any school where the principal is genuinely committed.
In the first two years of operation, we established:
| The core model | 600 unique student learning experiences delivered across business, further education, personal development and pathways to employment |
| Partners | 20 new business and alumni partners introduced; over 50 partners actively involved in supporting students |
| Recognition | Young Enterprise South Auckland Social Enterprise of the Year — Hoodarchy, whose community research engaged over 500 young people and directly informed Auckland Council’s Papakura amenities design, resulting in $15,000 of follow-on local board funding |
| Makerspace | Cross-curricular integration achieved across hard materials, art, science, Māori whaanau, and Pasifika cultural programmes in the first 24 months |
| Deloitte | Partnership deepened from speaker visit to four interconnected programmes: Grow Programme, hackathon, AI for Educators initiative, and teacher participation in Auckland Council’s Pasifika Insights project |
| Tech Internship | Building on the “Pathways to Employment” model and with the support of the Tindall Foundation, we piloted a mentor role who could work with students and partners across Manurewa and Papakura to create a pathway into high-value tech employment. |
“The awards ceremony was a great experience. Seeing and hearing about some of the top Young Enterprise Teams in Auckland was incredibly valuable. We hope we can inspire next year’s entrepreneurs at Papakura to achieve similar if not better results.” — Hoodarchy student
The Makerspace at Papakura has already moved beyond a workshop function. The “hominin skulls” project — 3D sculpted models created to support the Science Department — has grown into a small social enterprise selling sets to schools across the region. This mirrors exactly the trajectory the Manurewa Makerspace followed. The ecosystem is working.
Measuring impact in school-based entrepreneurship education is not straightforward. Employment statistics capture only one type of outcome, and the most important changes — in mindset, social capital, and self-belief — resist simple quantification. Our approach uses three interlocking measures that together answer whether the model is genuinely changing the school.
We track where students go on graduating: employment, further education, or into a career that was not in their frame of reference before their experience with the academy.
Named destinations matter in this tracking. When Year 12 English students go from having never heard of the advertising industry, to discovering the ad agency Bastion Shine as a place where they feel comfortable, we know the model is making the difference needed. When alumni like Deborah Paulo — a 2017 Manurewa leaver who went straight into employment in the tech industry — becomes a board member of the Business Academy Trust – current students can truly “be what they can see”. These are data points in a longitudinal picture of whether students are accessing pathways that would otherwise have been closed to them.
“I remember the scholarship interview with John and Léonie Hynds like it was yesterday, because it was lifechanging. They helped me to see I am good enough.” — Naotia Atiana, Manurewa High leaver 2014
We track whether business partners return, deepen their involvement and bring other organisations with them. A partner who expands their commitment is evidence of genuine ecosystem health. The Deloitte partnership at Papakura is the clearest current example. What began with the introduction of Deloitte’s Grow programme, expanded to a hackathon that include the expertise of Amazon Web Services, and an AI for Educators initiative co-designed with teachers. Add in the opportunity for teacher participation in a major Auckland Council community research project that Deloitte facilitated. That trajectory tells us the model is providing genuine value to partners, not just extracting support from them.
Long-standing partnerships at Manurewa — EY, ANZ, and the University of Auckland Business School, each maintained for multiple years — validate the same principle at scale.
The third measure is the most telling. We track whether entrepreneurial learning and Makerspace activity spreads beyond the Business Learning Area into other learning areas — and whether it does so because teachers choose to bring it in, not because the Academy prompted them.
At Papakura in 2025, this spread is already evident. Art teachers are integrating Makerspace into their programmes independently. Hard Materials teachers are embedding Design Thinking into their curriculum. Science, Māori whaanau classes, and Pasifika cultural programmes are all using the Makerspace as a regular resource. The Professional Learning Group for Makerspace skills is teacher-led and growing.
When an art teacher brings her own children into the Makerspace during school holidays, or when the school pools budgets across departments to invest in shared Makerspace equipment, the model has moved from external programme to school infrastructure. That is the outcome the model is designed to produce.
Together, these three measures answer a question more meaningful than any single output metric: is this an add-on programme, or is it change the school embraces and makes its own? At both Manurewa and Papakura, the evidence points clearly to the latter.
The Business Academy model is replicable, but it is not simple. Twelve years of delivery has clarified what is genuinely required, what is desirable, and what will cause the model to fail.
| Principal’s commitment | The principal must actively champion the Academy as a strategic priority — not merely permit it. Without this, business partners sense the ambivalence, teacher collaboration stalls, and the programme stagnates as an extracurricular add-on. |
| Programme manager | A dedicated, experienced manager who sits between the school and the business world is the single most important structural element. This person holds the partner relationships, carries the curriculum knowledge, manages the Makerspace activation, and maintains the momentum the school cannot sustain alone. |
| Makerspace | The Makerspace is the physical anchor of the model. It gives students a place where making and thinking intersect, attracts partners who want to see innovation in action, and enables cross-curricular integration that a classroom cannot. It also produces social enterprises — which in turn produce real-world business learning. |
| Adaptability through partnership | When the academy starts off in genuine partnership with the school, it allows for adaptability to the school context, ensuring that as partners are introduced, there is trust, understanding and reciprocity. |
The first year of a new Business Academy is primarily about relationship-building and infrastructure, not visible student outcomes. The programme manager spends the majority of their time establishing partner relationships, supporting teachers to build confidence with new methods, activating the Makerspace, and attending to the dozens of small trust-building moments that precede genuine ecosystem development.
Funders and school leadership who expect visible impact in year one will be disappointed, and may withdraw prematurely. The Manurewa model took three years to produce its first major outcome. The Papakura model produced South Auckland Social Enterprise of the Year in year two — faster than expected, because the programme manager brought the accumulated knowledge of 12 years in the field.
Honest accounting of what has not worked is as important as documenting successes. Over 12 years, the model has encountered three recurring risk factors.
Teacher dependency is the most acute. When the model’s success becomes attached to one exceptional teacher, departure of that teacher can destabilise an entire programme year. The response at Papakura — bringing Brendan Lambert in to provide depth and succession in the Business Learning Area — is a direct response to this risk learned at Manurewa.
Building delays and physical environment matter more than expected. Years of waiting for the new Business Academy building at Manurewa taught us that an uninspiring physical space communicates a ceiling of ambition to students and partners alike. Investment in the physical environment is not optional — it is a signal about what the community believes students deserve.
Programme breadth without depth dilutes impact. The model works best when it goes deep into a small number of well-designed experiences rather than attempting to touch every student through light-touch activities. Quality of engagement drives the outcomes we track, not quantity of events.
Papakura High School is now entering its third year of Business Academy operation. With the arrival of Brendan Lambert — an award-winning YES teacher — the Papakura model moves from establishment phase to maturity phase. The reintroduction of Young Enterprise at Level 3, the addition of Economics and Accounting, and the deepening of the Deloitte partnership all signal a programme with the foundations to sustain itself.
With a mature second school now established, Hynds Foundation is actively developing the framework for introducing the model to further schools. Selection criteria draw directly from what the model requires: a community, a committed principal, and a school with the governance stability and openness to partnerships that the model depends on.
The Business Academy is not a programme we deliver to schools. It is a partnership we build with them — one that requires genuine commitment on both sides, and that we approach knowing the first three years are an investment in an ecosystem, not a procurement of outcomes.