Students at a Leyton school were offered an insight into what it takes to make it in Silicon Valley when they received a visit from Wikipedia founder Jimmy Wales.

The web entrepreneur waived his usual £50,000 fee to offer advice to pupils at Norlington School as part of the Speakers for Schools programme.

Mr Wales advised students to take risks and not to feat failure, revealing his online encyclopaedia had only come about after a series of failed business ventures in the 1990s.

“The normal case for an entrepreneur is failure. Jimmy Wales is good at failure,” he said.

“It is important to learn how to fail because it is only when you feel comfortable with the idea that you might fail that you can take a risk and do something.

“That is very hard for people to get their heads round.

“In Silicon Valley, if you start a business and it fails, that does not hurt your career prospects at all.

“It’s considered to be a plus, as long as you understand it and you learn from it. You are more interesting than if you just took a job because it was safe.”

Speakers for School is a charity that provides prominent figures from a wide range of industries to give talks at state schools.

Almost 2,000 schools across the UK have applied to host speakers as part of the scheme.

Norlington School Computer Science teacher Mr Farrance said: “The message that it is okay to fail is a very powerful one for our students.

“If you have an idea, like Mr Wales did, that you believe in, then you must persevere.

“To get the opportunity to learn from such a successful entrepreneur was a truly unique experience.”