Are You Ready? »
About ‘Are You Ready’ »
Mission Statement »
S-Factor 5 – All schools evaluate the impact of enterprise and entrepreneurship education so it can be continuously improved.
S-Factor 5 – All schools evaluate the impact of enterprise and entrepreneurship education so it can be continuously improved.
Enterprise education should be continually evolving. What worked with one group won’t necessarily work with another. Practice and provision will need to change to keep up with growing skills and aspirations. And practitioners need the chance to regularly assess and re-align provision in relation to needs.
Enterprise needs to be managed so all pupils enjoy the benefits. All pupils should experience coherent and progressive enterprise learning, that ranges from broadly enterprising curricula to discrete business and entrepreneurial activities.
As a school or college you will want to assess what skills young people are learning, so that you can evaluate them and make progress with their enterprise skills, knowledge and understanding. There are many resources out there that can support you to do this.
What we do:
A key part of our strategy has been to harness the Warwick Award for Excellence in Enterprise Education to develop the commitment to and quality of enterprise in education.
By addressing critical factors including assessment and the leadership and management of enterprise, the award supports schools, colleges and university’s to create high quality enterprise learning.
We have also championed Action Learning as an effective way of developing and testing enterprise interventions. The Action Learning model ensures that focus, rigour and evaluation are an integral part of developing new enterprise learning.
In terms of skills development, our approach has been to place an emphasis on self review and reflection. Enterprise learning can be captured in scrapbooks, passports, on films or in blogs. Our Big 13 guide – enterprise entitlement through the curriculum – illustrates the many different ways schools we work with have developed creative and meaningful methods of reflection. We’ve also worked with schools to develop an Enterprise Passport based on The Big 13 and a guide to support effective teacher and student questioning and reflection called ‘The Question is the Answer.’
Schools and colleges have methods and preferred models of working, but enterprise shouldn’t be any different than any other subject – it will be most effective and have the most impact when it is reviewed, evaluated and continuously improved.
Inspiration
- A Head Teacher of a primary school undertook Action Learning to harness enterprise to raise under-confident girls’ mathematics attainment. Teachers planned a term of enterprise activity which involved using and applying mathematics through costing and budgeting, weighing and measuring and handling money. The Head Teacher devised a methodology to baseline and evaluate the girls’ performance. The intervention not only increased their mathematical attainment, but the group’s attendance and attitudes to learning improved too. Other staff reviewed their curriculum and teaching styles to learn from the intervention and implement and evaluate similar activities.
- A Secondary school used Enterprise Passports to monitor and evaluate how well students were developing enterprise skills. Students used the passport to record and reflect on their strengths and weaknesses. The passport provided tangible evidence of the skills students felt they were developing, which enabled teachers to identify gaps in provision. Whilst it appeared easy for students to complete team work and communication sections of the passport, risk taking, initiative and leadership were more often scantily completed, prompting staff to review and develop opportunities for these skills to be developed.
- A college sought students’ views to evaluate their enterprise provision. Staff used interviews, course feedback forms, and enterprise and enrichment evaluations to find out what students thought and needed. This process also helped them identify and direct support to students that were considering self employment.
