A TAVISTOCK College team has been selected in the Tycoon for Schools competition 2013 to receive a loan to start a business while at school.

More than 250 secondary schools signed up to take part in the national enterprise competition and prepare business plans making them as exciting and imaginative as possible to try and catch the eye of Dragons' Den star and entrepreneur Peter Jones CBE.

Some 120 schools got through to the next stage gaining grants of up to £1,000 to trade for a period of four weeks during November.

The business concept for the Tavistock team centres around several aspects of marketing primarily providing website design, logo design, marketing material such as business cards and letterheads and social media set-up.

The group hopes to charge an attractive price to local businesses and help bring them into the future.

Following the end of trading, all teams will be judged on innovation, performance and profits.

The overall competition winner and four special award winners will be announced in January 2014.

The range of business ideas proposed and executed last year show how imaginative secondary school students can be. Innovative business ideas ranged from hand crafted clothing exchanges and community written recipe books, to customized technology accessories and even a potential cure for arthritis in horses.

Following backing from the Department of Business, Innovation & Skills, the competition received a funding injection of £50,000, enabling more secondary school children to take part and rollout the campaign.

The competition is implemented easily within each school using a range of specially designed and unique teacher resources developed to support the Tycoon in Schools teams as they progress their business ideas.

The resources are designed to help students and inform their thinking when developing their business idea and working out the costs and projected cash flow forecast as well as support the completion of the Tycoon in Schools business plan template.

Tavistock school team member Ryan Maloney said: 'We're really looking forward to being able to support, and help develop local businesses into the new-age market.'