What teachers actually do during a Blastbeat year.

If you’ve been asked by your principal to be the “Blastbeat lead teacher” this year, the most important thing to know up front is this: your job is not to teach the programme. It’s to de-risk a team of fourteen students running a real business.

That’s a different posture. It’s also why teachers who’ve done it once tend to want to do it every year.

The five-phase year, at a glance

The Blastbeat year breaks into five phases. Your role shifts in each one.

Phase 1: Form (weeks 1–3)

This is the hands-on phase for you. Three things matter.

Casting the team. Your students self-organise into 14 roles, but you brief the criteria. CEO needs to be calm under pressure. CFO needs accuracy. Marketing needs energy. Production needs reliability. Read the full role profile guide here.

Setting the constraint. The team needs to know early what venue size, ticket price band, and date window they’re working with. You set the rails. They drive between them.

Establishing the meeting rhythm. Two team meetings a week, ideally one short stand-up and one longer planning session. You attend the longer one for the first three weeks — then phase out.

Phase 2: Plan (weeks 4–7)

The planning phase is where teachers most often over-step. You’ve been a teacher your whole career — the temptation to fix the marketing plan is enormous. Don’t.

Your job in Phase 2 is to ask three questions, in this order, every single week:

1. What did you commit to last week?
2. What did you actually do?
3. What blocked you?

That’s the entire teacher contribution. Block 3 is where you intervene, and only there.

Phase 3: Sell (weeks 8–11)

This is the phase teachers worry about most. Tickets, sponsors, content, social. The team is doing public-facing work and the failure modes are visible. The thing to remember is that visibility is the lesson. A team that publicly under-sells their event is having the most useful business experience of their lives.

Your job in Phase 3:

• Safeguard the school’s reputation. Approve external messaging that goes out under the school name. (We provide a one-page checklist for this.)
• Open one door. Most teams need one external contact at this stage — a venue, a sponsor, a printer. You provide one. They handle the rest.
• Stay out of the spreadsheet. The CFO is responsible for the budget. The CEO is responsible for decisions. Your only role on the financials is to ask “does the math check?”

Phase 4: Run (week 12 — event week)

This is the spike. You’ll work harder this week than at any other point. Three commitments make it manageable:

Be present, not in charge. Be at the venue early. Walk the run-of-show with the CEO. Don’t take any decisions for the team. If something goes wrong on the night, the team handles it — you provide the safety net for anything that crosses into safeguarding territory.

The 8pm rule. If you find yourself making operational decisions on the night, stop. Find the CEO. Ask them. Their answer is the answer.

Photographs. Take more than you think you need. Parents, sponsors and the principal all want them.

Phase 5: Reflect & finale (weeks 13–16)

The teaching is in the reflection. Three pieces of work happen here:

1. Closing P&L — the CFO leads, you check.
2. The climate-project commitment — 25% of profits, ring-fenced. Team chooses the project. You facilitate the decision-making.
3. The 1500-word individual reflective — the formal assessment piece. Each student writes about their own role.

The regional finale event closes the year — teams pitch their work to a wider audience. We help organise it.

The four moments you’ll thank yourself

1. Week 1: when you bite your tongue and let them disagree about the venue.
2. Week 6: when the marketing plan is wrong and you don’t fix it.
3. Event week: when you sleep through the social-media argument because it’s 9pm and they’ll figure it out.
4. Phase 5: when you read the reflectives and realise how much they actually learned.

What we give you

• A 30-page lead-teacher handbook
• One half-day onboarding workshop (live or recorded)
• The role rubric for each of the 14 students
• A standard parent-letter template
• WhatsApp/Slack-style support channel with the Blastbeat team
• Two check-ins from us during the year (Phase 2 + Phase 4)
• The closing impact-report template

What about workload?

The honest answer: you’ll spend about 2.5–3 hours per teaching week, with a spike of 12–15 hours in event week. Lead teachers across our 2024 cohort logged an average of 78 hours total across the year — not far off the load of a single subject.

The trade-off is that the year produces the artefact your professional review will most often cite, and the night your principal will most often photograph.