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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.

Shaking Up Education in Leeds

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I trained as a teacher in Leeds back in the 1980s.  And ever since there has been nothing but ‘shake-ups in education’.  Nine years as a School Governor in the city was characterised by a succession of initiatives, mostly from Whitehall, to be dealt with.

But inspite of all of this change, very little real progress.  You don’t believe that rise in examination results every year for the last 29 do you?

So what happens when you float a radical idea related to education in the city?  A senior public sector manager snorts loudly and says ‘That’ll never happen’.

Nice.  Way to go.  Innovation Central.  Thank you!

The idea?  Not a manifesto.  Not even a proposal.  Just an idea….

What if every school in the city carried the same proportion of pupils from poor homes?  Instead of some schools having no ‘poor kids’ and others having a majority, why not find ways to ensure that every school has a very similar profile of wealth in its population?

What might the impact be on the quality of education right across the city?

Or how about this?

Why not take the money that we currently spend on inward investment and tourism in the city and instead use it to reduce class sizes across Leeds?  We might then attract employers to our city because of the quality of the education we offer, the resulting talented workforce and providing great education to employers and employees children?  Tourists might come because the citizens of Leeds are actually able to produce an experience  that few can match.

  • What are the other radical ideas that we could explore in relation to education in Leeds?
  • How do we produce citizens who know how to make their enterprising souls sing?
  • How do we overcome the disparity in achievement that is dictated more by a fate of birth than anything else?

Anyone up for an Innovation Lab on Education in Leeds?

The End of (Enterprise) Education?

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My eldest daughter came home from school last week with something like 10kg of university prospectuses.  She spent much of the week-end browsing the frightening range of courses available. 

And it got me thinking about whether the compulsory education that she has experienced so far, all 13 years of it, have really provided her with an excellent platform for wealth and fulfillment in her adult life.  And the result of my pondering was:

  1. As a premise I believe that education is at its best when it socialises people into the obligations and freedoms of active citizenship, and immunises them against imprisonment by the gilded cages of consumerism.  So why does so much (enterprise) education appear to be about the development of the next generation of employer fodder/entrepreneurs/snake oil sellers?
  2. Is this because we are failing to teach the real meaning of ‘social enterprise’ now that it has become embedded in what Todd Hannula describes as ‘agency led mush’? 
  3. Have we ever properly taught the notion of social enterprise?  Is it really more the the pursuit of ‘enlightened self interest’ in the marketplace?
  4. To release prodigious human energies and good will we must learn how to help people find powerful narratives that give meaning and direction to their lives.  
  5. We must help them to learn about themselves at least as much as we should help them learn about the world outside of them.
  6. We must encourage them to explore what they love and who they can become in pursuit of their potential.
  7. We must educate them to properly understand their own self interest and how this fits with the self interest of others in a mutually sustainable and progressive community. 
  8. We must help them to become experts in using power in pursuit of mutual self interest.
  9. We must help them to build their power in creating the kind of future that they want to see for themselves and for the diverse communities that live on spaceship earth.

Perhaps consideration of these statements might just help us to realise ‘the end of (enterprise) education’.

Teaching Enterprise and Entrepreneurship (or any other Significant Learning)

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When I did my teacher training back in 1986 I remember having my world rocked by a book called ‘Teaching as a Subversive Activity’ by Neil Postman and Charles Weingartner.   They make reference to a piece by Carl Rogers in ‘On Becoming a Person’.

“Rogers concludes:

  1. My experience has been that I cannot teach another person how to teach.
  2. It seems to me that anything that can be taught to another is relatively inconsequential, and has little or no significant impact on behavior.
  3. I realize increasingly that I am only interested in learnings which significantly influence behavior
  4. I have come to feel that the only learning which significantly influences behavior is self-discovered, self appropriated learning.
  5. Such self-discovered, truth that has been personally appropriated and assimilated in experience, cannot be directly communicated to another.
  6. As a consequence I have realised that I have lost interest in being a teacher

Rogers goes on to state that the outcomes of trying to teach are either unimportant or hurtful and that he is only interested in being a learner.  Some of our students react to this statement snidely, claiming that Rogers feels this way because he is a bad teacher.  Honest, but bad.  Others seem deeply disturbed by it and seek clarification on what Rogers means by ‘significant learning’.  We then produce Roger’s definition of the term, which is stated in the form of specific behaviours.  They include:

The person comes to see himself differently.

He accepts himself and his feelings more fully.

He becomes more self-confident and self directing.

He becomes more the person he would like to be.

He becomes more flexible, less rigid in his perceptions.

He adopts more realistic goals for himself.

He behaves in a more mature fashion.

He becomes more open to the evidence, both of what is going on outside of himself and what is going on inside of himself.”

Powerful stuff.  What Rogers seems to be saying is that what we can teach, in the traditional sense is more or less trivial.  However what the student can learn from the process is potentially transformational.

I think Rogers was onto something here, something that is particularlypowerful for those of us charges with ‘teaching enterprise’.  If we really want to develop more enterprising students then perhaps we should focus less on classes about marketing, branding, cash flow and taxation and more on providing and reviewing experiences that are designed to develop ‘Significant Learning’.

Because Rogers’ definition of  ‘Significant Learning’  looks a lot like ‘more enterprising’ to me. 

Thoughts?