MAXIMISE Women’s Business Magazine |Feature Article
Fleur Sexton, taking a personal stand for education. Fleur Sexton, the managing director and cofounder of PET-Xi Training in Coventry, West Midlands, risked everything from her own health to the family home in her quest to build one of the UK’s most successful training and education operations.
The Present
The Beginning
We work with youngsters heading for a failed grade at GCSEs by running a week of intensive coaching to ensure students achieve a pass and we have helped over 100,000 youngsters from Northumberland to Cornwall reach their academic potential.
The idea to set-up a training and education company started when I was working as a teacher at a special school with blind students who were struggling to learn a language and I wanted to change that.
We now run programmes for schools, courses for businesses and individuals and vocational programmes throughout the UK from our offices in Coventry and Sheffield.
I devised a course and it was so well received, I decided to launch PET-Xi Training from a spare bedroom in our house in 1995.
Achieving grade C or above particularly in Maths and English improves the choices for students whether that is in higher education, an apprenticeship or traineeship.
Over the next five years, I continued to work as a teacher so that we could afford to pay our bills as well as fund the business and then when we were established, I left teaching to concentrate on the business full-time.
An expanding area is training and upskilling for people at work (business courses). Our research showed many women who were returning to work after raising their children had the personal skills but needed to update their IT skills.
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We are one of only three centres in Europe chosen to run Microsoft Office Specialist programmes to teach and accredit highly-employable IT skills in Microsoft Word, PowerPoint and Excel.
