Leadership and innovation
There were important strengths in leadership for enterprise in education. Planning and developing enterprise contexts and approaches to learning stimulated teaching and support staff, parents, and pupils themselves to take on leadership roles. The role of the head of school or centre was crucial in sharing a vision for enterprise in education and enabling individuals to play a part in achieving that vision. Leadership for enterprise in education was, however, emerging at all levels in schools, centres and CLD contexts, extending beyond managers and including learners, classroom teachers and support staff. Staff and pupils felt they were being encouraged to engage, to suggest creative and innovative approaches to learning, and to become active stakeholders.
Pupils were taking the lead in learning and making decisions. The pupil council had a budget allocated for its work. Many pupils were involved in projects, leading debate in addressing issues of real social need, for example homelessness, recycling and sustainable development. Inspector’s comment on pupils as leaders in a secondary school |
Stakeholders noted that there had been progressively clearer and stronger messages, from central project staff leading Determined to Succeed, that schools and education authorities should focus their resources and energy on learning and teaching issues, helpfully reinforcing a main thrust of Curriculum for Excellence. That influence had been helpful in keeping an emphasis on leadership for learning. A further direct contribution from Determined to Succeed had been the active promotion of leadership development. This included providing opportunities for local authority staff and members of school senior management teams to participate in some highly regarded commercial programmes, alongside development opportunities within theExcellence through Education Business Links (EEBL) programme for teachers.
Continuing professional development in enterprise in education is also a vital part of our work. Five staff have now been on EEBL placements and we have used commercial organisations to work with all staff. School reflections on the benefits of continuous professional development |
Staff taking EEBL placements spent time with businesses, working to an agreed set of outcomes which could include management and leadership objectives. Individuals who had participated in these programmes rated them highly, and described them as valuable complements, quite different in their aims and methodologies, to more formal programmes such as the Scottish Qualification for Headship. Staff had gained significantly from EEBL placements in their awareness of work-related issues and business economics, in ways which they could use directly to improve schools’ work in developing pupils’ employability and skills for entrepreneurship.
Education authorities’ role in leadership
Most education authorities provided effective leadership for enterprise in education, for example through policy statements which set out their expectations clearly, and effective arrangements to support and challenge schools. Most education authorities had created effective structures among their central staff, including those with remits for quality improvement. Enterprise development officers, working at local authority level, played key roles in supporting local developments, and in drawing on good practice from national staff development and networking. A number of schools and authorities had appointed promoted teaching staff, for example at faculty principal teacher level, with enterprise prominent in their remits. In some of these posts, the focus on enterprise was sometimes helpfully paired with related themes such as creativity.
The school is well supported by the local authority in all areas of enterprise in education. Regular meetings are held with the enterprise coordinator, Careers Scotland and other professionals and parent representatives. The school received strong support from a range of partners, with the education authority making a particularly effective contribution through the enterprise development officer. Inspector’s comments on roles for the education authority and other partners in supporting enterprise in secondary schools. |
Signpost to improvement |
Enterprising approaches play an important part in improving leadership and encouraging innovation by helping leaders to:
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Enterprise in education was a prominent theme in continuing professional development in all authorities, including, in some, the leadership development programmes described earlier in this report. Most councils gave good emphasis to promoting good practice in enterprise in education, providing challenging benchmarks for managers and making an effective contribution to leadership. Where council policies were clear about the importance of systematic self-evaluation, the process of identifying and sharing good practice had been made easier. Many councils provided some form of newsletter for schools and parents, as did many of the centres and schools, either specific to enterprise in education or giving the aspect a strong profile among more general educational news. Some councils offered high-profile events to celebrate the good practice in their schools, including the recognition of different kinds of achievement. These approaches were all helpful in signalling a strong lead from the councils, with the added benefit of keeping parents and the wider community up to date with key developments.
Accountability and self-evaluation
Systematic self-evaluation of enterprise in education was evident in only a minority of the centres and schools in the task leading to this report, and more widely in the general inspection programme. Some centres failed to conduct other than cursory evaluations of the quality of their provision for enterprise, and of its impacts, sometimes on the basis that they found aspects of enterprise challenging to define and difficult to evaluate. Stakeholders had, in the main, very positive views of the benefits of enterprise in education but few had attempted to support these views through systematic, recorded professional reviews of the evidence. The absence of reliable analysis of stakeholder opinions, direct observations of the quality of learners’ experience, and information about outcomes, such as those used as the basis of this report, left the schools insufficiently well informed about the quality of the educational experience and the impact on pupils, and poorly placed to make key decisions to improve provision. Most centres and schools were aware of relevant national self-evaluation guidance for enterprise in education, and some had used these resources in general ways to inform their thinking. Very few had used the HMIE/Determined to Succeed self-evaluation guide as it was intended, to provide a robust contribution to reporting on standards and quality and as a tool for improvement planning.
The enterprising culture …has not been achieved overnight. It has been the result of self-evaluation and development of the centre’s own practice, using examples of good practice from elsewhere, over the last eight years. Our enterprising culture can be directly related to the four capacities of Curriculum for Excellence. Further use of the quality indicators will help the school to focus on key priorities. Completing this self-evaluation has been a very useful exercise and has helped to give the school confidence that it is heading in the right direction, whilst also giving clear direction of the way forward. There is a whole-school policy on enterprise, overseen by senior managers. The PT curriculum with responsibility for enterprise in education led in-service training for all staff in 2005, using How good is our school at enterprise in education?. Reflections on self-evaluation in a pre-school centre, primary school and secondary school |
Signpost to improvement |
Self-evaluation, used effectively, improves practice in enterprise in education.
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