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Improving Employability…

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Businesses reading the future of the labour market and feeding employment needs back in to the education system sounds like a great plan.

Except we haven’t yet found a way to do it.

We do not know enough about how the labour market will shape up with enough ‘notice’ to make any real difference to the educational process at all.

And then there is the small matter that education is not all about employability and entrepreneurship.

Few teachers join the education system as a kind of prep school for employers and have an innate suspicion of employers looking for ready made employment ‘fodder’. The vision for education is larger than slotting people into jobs. It is about the realisation of potential. In the heads of many education professionals the two goals of realising potential and developing employability make uncomfortable bed-fellows.

I have been involved in Vocational Education and Training, both on the policy side and in practice for over 25 years. Not one of those 25 years has gone by without similar diagnoses and prescriptions:

  • A stronger role for employers,
  • more business in the curriculum,
  • better specifications of what it means to be employable (whole careers can be developed in this field),
  • reformations of the careers service,
  • more employability projects, internships, mentoring, and so on.

And while our engagement as ‘business people’ may help us to feel like we are doing our part, and there are plenty of awards to be won, in the grand schemes of things it makes very little difference. 20+ years of ‘improving school standards’ and still employers complaining about the product…..

If we are serious about improving the life chances of our young people we need to radically revise the nature of the education process and system, not bolt on another committee.

We need to encourage young people to know themselves, their passions and and their potential (almost impossible when you are asked to turn interest on and off at the call of the school bell).  Instead of trying to take slivers of the real world into school we should do much, much more to get children into adult company in real work and non-work settings, public, private and third sector. It is not just business that needs to be more involved with schools, but adult society in general.  Personally I think that post 14 most young people should spend more time being educated outside the school than in it.

There is an argument to say that the only thing children really learn at school is how to relate to an authoritarian system, either through compliance or defiance.

If we are serious about the potential of all our young people then tinkering with the curriculum and the occasional day of smoothie making is just not going to cut it. We need to re-think how we prepare young people to play full lives in adult society. And as a nation that is a debate that we not seem to have the political will to hold.

Bonsai People in a Bonsai Culture?

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Bonsai = An ornamental tree or shrub grown in a pot and artificially prevented from reaching its normal size

The bonsai is not a genetic variant but has within it the potential to become a fully grown tree.  However it is carefully cultivated to meet the demanding requirements of the gardener.  It is fed few nutrients, kept in shallow soil, not allowed to form deep roots, continually pruned and kept ‘in proportion’; shaped to the precise requirements of the gardener and the specifications of their profession.

Bonsai People

Bonsai people have had their development limited, distorted and shaped by the influence of their environment rather more than it has been driven by their own potential and aspirations.  To an extent we are all Bonsai People.  But some people have been more bonsaid than others.

And some seem to be very content with their bonsai nature.  While others are frustrated at the sensation that there must be something more in them than this.

Yesterday I was on the phone with Rich Huxley and we were talking about developing musicians. I told him of a mentor in Leeds who had boasted to me about how they had worked with a 14 year old boy whose ambition was ‘to be the best bass guitarist in the world’ and had managed to get them to realise just what a preposterous and unlikely goal this was.  Instead he persuaded the lad that 5 grades A-C was a much more achievable and better ambition.

One of my own daughters was told while studying for GCSEs that she should play less netball and see less of her boyfriend in order to study more as she had the chance to get ‘straight As’.  This of course had much more to do with a teacher and a school under a hard performance management regime than it did the ‘spiritual, mental and physical development’ of my daughter!

I was encouraged to pursue my abilities in maths, physics and biology on the grounds that they were ‘the future’ rather than my then interests in community work, punk and ecology.  Funnily enough community, music and sustainability have proven life-long passions.  Maths? Not so much.

Young people are encouraged in all sorts of ways to drop art, music, drama and so on, in pursuit of ‘more academic’ subjects.   If you are going to spend 39k a year on a degree then you had better make sure it has a job at the end of it etc.   It is as if the sole purpose of education is to get as many employer brownie points as possible.  To produce the perfect Bonsai rather than nurture potential and passion.

We might as well put education in the UK into the hands of the Department for Business for heaven’s sake….

And I have worked with lots of professionals, who tell me that they are ‘not in the right job’, that ‘this is not really me’.  Most were offered ‘training’ (usually in accountancy, management or some other commercial discipline) that would be good for their career.  They might not have been enthusiastic, but never look a gift horse in the mouth etc.  Before they know it they are in finance department earning decent money trapped in job that is just not them.  They are bonsai of themselves.

Sound familiar?

There is a massive difference between schooling – training to conform and meet someone elses specification and educating – drawing out and developing potential, exploring and nurturing individuality.  Much of what we today call education is really little more than schooling.

Living in A Bonsai Culture?

Could we be living in a predominantly bonsai culture, where relatively few people are deeply interested in the potential of themselves, never mind their neighbours.  What passes for a culture of self-improvement now largely focuses on enhancing abs, pecs, other bits of the anatomy and ‘style’ rather than the continual development of character, personality and ‘self’.  The main pre-occupation is less ‘what might I become?’ than ‘how can I fit in’ or ‘how can I get by?’

Or instead of focussing on potential we focus on what we are told are ‘flaws’. Corrections of perceived ‘abnormalities’ rather than a genuine exploration of potential and individuality.

Escaping the Bonsai Culture…

…seems like an almost impossible ask.  Once you start looking the tools of the bonsai gardener are everywhere, in the media, adverts, politicians manifestos indeed just about every external stimulus that we are exposed to is designed to influence us, to shape us to persuade us in some direction.  Even this post…

But we can choose to:

  • Spend more time with people who value us for who we are and not what we might do
  • Reflect more on who we are and what we might become
  • Be comfortable talking about our own development, what it might mean and how it might be approached – rather than relying on the prescriptions of our chosen ‘teachers’
  • and think twice about whether a course of action is likely to make us more like the person that we want to be, or more like the person that someone else wants us to become?

If these themes and possibilities interest you then check out Progress School running in Leeds

 

 

 

 

A Way Forward for Communities?

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Sustainable community based enterprise

There is no doubt in my mind that community based and bottom up approaches to enterprise support like those pioneered by Ernesto Sirolli and subsequently developed and transformed by projects like Bizz Fizz and on a much more modest scale Elsie, provide significant clues to the emergence of truly sustainable and enterprising communities.

But instead we get celebrity entrepreneurs and academics delivering masterclass after masterclass after enterprise competition on a seemingly endless treadmill driven by incoherent policy and the increasingly desperate search for those Holy Grails of ‘narrow’  economic development – the quick win and the high-growth start-up.
It must be time for us to develop a focus on long term, community building  approaches to sustainable development that embraces the economy, culture and social cohesion as an inseparable trinity.  These things cannot be pursued successfully as separate entities managed by different silos. They are all part of the same process of ‘development’.
We need to develop affordable processes that engage the whole community in nurturing the development of those willing to act boldly and helping more of its members to see that bold action will often reap its reward, not just for the individual but for the community as a whole.  We must help to build communities that know how to recognise and help enterprising people who are looking to make a living and leave the community better off as a result.
And we must persuade policy makers, economic planners and perhaps most importantly our fellow citizens that entrepreneurship is not the only valid form of expression for our enterprising souls.

Some forgotten truths about enterprise…

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  • Poverty is not about scarcity – it is not that there is not enough – but that it is not shared
  • The challenge is to give more people the power that they need to play a positive and powerful role in markets; This means accessible and relevant processes to develop individual capabilities and power
  • Markets will always have a place in our society but not everything can be bought and sold.  Care for example is an emotional relationship that cannot be bought and sold.
  • Development is a measure of the extent to which individuals have the capabilities to live the life that they choose.  It has little to do with standard economic measures such as GDP.
  • Helping people to recognise choices and increase the breadth of choices available to them should be a key objective of development.
  • Developing the capability and power of individuals provides a key to both development and freedom
  • Development must be relevant to lives, contexts, and aspirations
  • Development is about more than the alleviation of problems – stamping out anti social behaviour, teenage pregnancies, poor housing and so on.
  • It is about helping people to become effective architects in shaping their own lives
  • We need practices that value individual identity; avoid lumping people into “communities” they may not want to be part of, and promote a person’s freedom to make her own choices.  Promoting identification with ‘community’ risks segregation and violence between communities
  • Society must take a serious interest in the overall capabilities that someone has to lead the sort of life they want to lead, and organise itself to support the development and practice of those capabilities
  • We should primarily develop an emphasis on individuals as members of the human race rather than as members of ethnic groups, religions or other ‘communities’.  Humanity matters.
  • We need to make the delivery of public education, more equitable, more efficient and more accessible

If we took this stuff seriously what kind of enterprise development activities would a LEP commission?