Lord Young Review of Enterprise in Education, ‘Enterprise for All, the relevance of enterprise in education’ released today

Today sees the release of Lord Young’s Review of Enterprise in Education entitled, ‘Enterprise for All, the relevance of enterprise in education’. The key recommendations are listed below: The publication of a Future Employment and Earnings Record (FEER) after leaving education for every FE and HE course Developing an ‘Enterprise Passport’ to capture recognised extra curricular activity A new national volunteer network of ‘Enterprise Advisers’, coordinated by the LEPs, to work closely with school heads Embedding enterprise flavour into new school curriculum materials and examinations Providing teachers with experience in business as part of their Continuous Professional Development Level 3 vocational courses in FE to include a module on working for yourself and how to start up a business as a core component Universities to have an elective enterprise module available to all students An active and supported enterprise society in every university A ‘start-up programme’ in all universities that have business schools holding Small Business Charter status. This should include specific provision for starting and funding social entrepreneurship Create an incentive and reward structure for enterprise activity at universities by developing an enterprise “E-Star” award This review, whilst focussed in terms of time, has involved many stakeholders across the education sector and has captured a lot of the excellent work that is already undertaken. The most controversial recommendation is arguably the FEER idea. AoC are certainly not questioning the potential usefulness of a measure that clearly maps the earning potential of a particular career path against each qualification or programme, but we would be concerned if this was the only yard stick used. In the same way that you would not select a car merely on engine size or its cost, we do not believe that FEER should be anything more than an indicator, a factor in more informed choice for young people and their influencers before deciding on their educational choices. There is also an element of concern as to how accurate such a measure could be given all the other variables that determine a successful career…… which is one of the points that the review itself makes! The Enterprise Passport also looks like a useful addition for young learners looking to differentiate themselves in the job market. If nothing else, it is highly likely to help in the gathering together of all the possible educationally related enterprise offers that are available currently as all will need to be listed (and potentially vetted for quality) before they can be included. The single FE only recommendation is for the inclusion of a knowledge based core module in L3 vocational courses to ensure all know how to establish a business. It is a shame that the focus is on the knowledge and not the attitude/access to enterprise experience. All in all, the review represents what is currently happening pretty well and draws on the excellent practice seen in pockets in all areas of education to make recommendations to spread such practice. It is hard to argue with this approach and it will be interesting to see how many of the ideas make it fully into the mainstream.