Help to Grow Programme with Keele Business School (Keele University)
May 1, 2026
About the course
The Help to Grow: Management Course is a 12-week programme covering all aspects of business management, from strategy to digital transformation, from marketing to finance, from HR to ops. Each cohort brings together senior leaders from a diverse range of local small- and medium-sized businesses for a series of online modules, in-person workshops, peer mentoring, and much more besides. There’s a lot more info in the course brochure, which you can access here: https://smallbusinesscharter.org/assets/help-to-grow-management-course-brochure-november-2025.pdf
Eligibility
The course is open to applicants from small- to medium-sized enterprises that have been operating for over a year. Eligible individuals must be directors, owners, senior managers or managers with leadership responsibilities, and must have at least one staff member reporting directly to them. The businesses themselves must have between 5 and 249 employees. Charities are not eligible, though charities that contain a qualifying business/social enterprise can send a representative from that organisation. There is a cap of one attendee per business if they have 5-9 employees; two attendees per business for businesses that have (or grow to have) 10-249 employees.
Bursaries
The course is primarily funded by the Government, and Keele Business School offers all participants a full bursary covering the remaining fees, so participants don’t have to pay anything to benefit. However, we have to be careful how we advertise this as not all business schools have the same policy- e.g. we can’t advertise the course as ‘free’, but we can say things like ‘full bursaries are available’ or ‘you can participate at no cost to yourself or your business, thanks to our full bursaries’. Obviously, if you’re speaking one-to-one with a business, you can say it’s free, the restriction is more about social media posts, newsletters and other forms of public messaging.
Application process
The application form (Sept 2026: https://smallbusinesscharter.org/h2gmcourse/keele-6) can be quite intimidating- it asks for a lot of information, and may ask applicants to commit to paying the fees that will ultimately be covered by our bursaries. You may need to reassure, hand-hold, follow up etc. to get your contacts over the line- although once they fill out the first page, which asks for fewer details, they are on the system and we can follow up with them ourselves. Similarly, feel free to share my email address with anyone who would like to find out more about the programme- very happy to respond to any queries, set up a call to discuss further, etc.
Attendance/completion
In order to complete the course, participants must complete 9 out of 12 modules. ‘Completing a module’ just involves attending it (either online or in-person, live on a Thursday afternoon), but we understand that other commitments mean that participants won’t be able to attend every scheduled session over the 12 weeks of the course. Consequently, all sessions are recorded, and catching up on a recording is treated as equivalent to attending a module live (online or in-person). Theoretically, applying and accepting a bursary means that people are committing to completing the course (although in practice we have a degree of discretion about enforcing this, and we try to accommodate requests to defer/drop out where they have good reasons). There are other aspects to the course offer in addition to the modules/workshops (e.g. weekly peer group calls, one-to-one mentoring), but these are not strictly necessary nor counted as part of our completion rate.
Email helptogrow@keele.ac.uk for more information
