Rising star: Neil Logue
What's so special: He combines running his business with changing children's lives through his social enterprise

Nearly two years ago Neil Logue came up with a simple idea to change the lives of thousands of children. Through his day job as managing director of Thorpe Kilworth, a supplier and manufacturer of educational equipment, he was compelled to set up social enterprise Education for All.

"In a nutshell the aim of Education for All is to get the existing resources that are coming out of schools to be either reused in the UK or somewhere else in the world," explains Logue.

The government is running the world's largest school-construction programme, Building Schools for the Future, with a vision to renew around 3,500 secondary schools in the UK over a 15-year period at a cost of £50bn and Thorpe Kilworth has been involved with the refurbishment schemes. "The local authorities were spending around £30,000 per school to dispose of what you'd call legacy furniture—half of that was the direct cost of taking it to landfill," says Logue.

"I said that if you are going to spend this money, why don't we look at ways of spending it better? They had all this perfectly good stuff that could be redistributed either in the UK or elsewhere in the world."

So Education for All started redistributing furniture and equipment from closed-down schools to schools in the UK and abroad. The charity's mantra is reduce, reuse, recycle, and the target to divert over 90 per cent of unwanted furniture and equipment from landfill was achieved in 2007.

Logue says he has no experience in social or environmental issues. "My background is as a chartered accountant, and I come from rural Ireland so I understand those economical environments and I don't like waste," he says.

Involving government departments, local authorities and national builders among many others, Education for All has helped 54,000 children around the world. Now Partnerships for Schools is about to turn the initiative into policy. "It will be compulsory for everybody involved in the school-building programme to work out what to do with legacy furniture," says Logue. "Lots of people have very good ideas, but if you don't have a policy change it will go into landfill."