Four students from Barking Abbey School in East London went on the business trip of a lifetime when they visited the headquarters of Volvo Trucks in Gothenburg, Sweden.

The Year 11 students won the prize trip for taking first place in a 10-week enterprise competition called The Big Deal, run by Warwick’s outreach programme, UniTracks.

Karim Bentomane (15), James Jackson (15), Iqra Iqbal (15) and Sabiha Chowdhury (16) beat 17 other teams to earn their tickets to Sweden.

Their October half-term excursion included a factory tour, a visit to the Volvo Museum, and a pitching session and business lunch with senior Volvo executives. The students were hosted by the senior advisor for retail business development at Volvo Group Trucks, Otto Frommelt, who is himself an alumni of WBS. He said:

They have already achieved something exceptional, I think they will all go very far.”

The pupils also observed a teaching session at the University of Gothenburg and participated in a workshop led by peer mentors, which got them thinking about their aspirations for the future.

The Big Deal competition ran from February to April 2013, and culminated in a grand final where judges were wowed by the students’ pitch for “uni-set”, a student-led scheme designed to support young people from disadvantaged backgrounds in applying to top universities.

UniTracks is Warwick’s dedicated outreach programme for highly able students from underprivileged backgrounds and has been running since 2006.