Christopher Middleton visits a particularly enterprising school
It's been a good financial year at Bookworm. Since manageress Sophie Davies-Cooke started filling the shelves with the kind of reading matter that most pleased her customers - romances, crime novels and copies of Closer, Heat and OK! magazines - takings have been up five per cent on last year.

There has been a similar boom at Revive, the fashion store where the enterprising Kate Woods has obtained Royal Effem cosmetics at cost price and introduced a second-hand rack for buyers on a budget. Meanwhile, the colour revamp at Essentials next door has boosted sales and the new range of smoothies and real-fruit ice creams has improved takings at the tuck shop.
The tuck shop? That's right. This upbeat financial report comes not from some thriving high-street retail consortium, but from Moreton Hall girls' school, in Shropshire, where each year the pupils in the lower-sixth gain commercial experience by running the school's in-house businesses. Now they are about to bring together all these outlets into what may be Britain's first in-school shopping mall.
These aren't just pretend shops. The collective turnover amounts to about £35,000 a year, of which £10,000 is profit. In overall charge are managing director Katie Ibbotson-Smith and her deputy Sarah Martin, who hold weekly board meetings where they receive reports from the directors of the enterprises. These also include a stationery shop called Paperclip and the RK1 radio station, which broadcasts within a one-mile radius of the independent school (which charges between £13,283 and £22,500 for a boarding place).
Advertising is done through posters, word of mouth, mentions in morning assembly and leaflets inserted in the school reports.
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"Our most successful project this year was the Christmas pudding," says marketing director Louisa Wimbush, 17. "We negotiated a price with the school chef, paid for the personalised gift wrapping and sold 233 puddings at a profit of £2.80 a time." The next project for Moreton Enterprises is the launch of a new school scarf, followed by the big one: construction of a centralised shopping village, in which each retail outlet adjoins the other.
"At present, our shops are dotted inconveniently around the grounds," says tuck-shop director Eleanor Glazebrook. "But if we get approval for the shopping village, it will centralise the whole operation." The final yes or no for the scheme rests with the school's governing body. "It'll be up to the girls to make a formal presentation, with designs and costings," says Jonathan Forster, the school's principal. "Finance will come from previous years' profits, plus, we hope, a loan from Barclays Bank." There is a branch of Barclays already on the premises, run - you guessed it - by the girls.
"We have 65 account-holders in the school and each week the Oswestry branch of Barclays faxes us their balances," says the bank's director, Bridget Trevor-Jones, who is studying maths. "We're open every day during the lunch hour and people can either pay in cheques or take money out, up to a limit of £50 a day." "Obviously, some customers have more in their accounts than others," Bridget says discreetly. "But I can't say more than that because it's confidential." Quite right, too. As it happens, most transactions in the school shops are carried out not with cash, but credit.
This is topped up at the start of each term by a parental contribution of roughly £300, which is then spread across the various enterprises, so the girls (and shop staff) know precisely how much they've got to spend in each outlet per week. Each transaction is noted and the customer is told how much credit she has left. It's the job of finance director Frances Cummins, 17, to keep an eye on cash flow and to ensure that accounts are spot-checked regularly.
"It not only teaches girls the disciplines of business, it teaches them the interpersonal skills that are needed to run a business," says the school's head of business studies, Catherine Ashworth. "Every shop has at least two sales staff, who first have to be recruited and then kept motivated and supervised." "We're not looking to produce generations of junior businesswomen," says Jonathan Forster, "but we do want to give our girls an understanding of the realities of the outside world."