[Music]
[Applause]
well good morning
the story of enabling enterprise and and
this story really begins a decade ago
and at the time I was a very fresh-faced
new teacher to the extent that I have 14
year old students who looked decidedly
older than me I often got told to tuck
my shirt in and on one memorable
occasion deputy head stuck a head in and
asked who the responsible adult in the
room was which would have been fine had
I not been mid lesson teaching from the
front and there’s a new teacher there’s
a sort of new teacher bingo that you
take off particularly if you’re working
in a in a more challenging school see no
child throws Seng at you tick child
tries to escape through window tick
their child sets like to textbook tick
but actually what struck me more than
those individual incidents was a space a
growing sense of dissonance and a
dissonance between what I was seeing in
the classroom my 14 and 15 year old
students and the growing reality that
actually they were about to embark on
the rest of their lives
and in my classroom that sort of gap
manifested itself as you know being
unable to run a lesson without managing
the seating plan and working out exactly
who was friends with who at that
particular moment or when I’d ask the
question no one would put their hands up
and that was just about acceptable in
the classroom because we were marching
towards getting a good grade but what
would come after that after that might
be college and ins knew they in college
they wouldn’t have the same sort of
individual teacher looking out for them
trying to make sure everything was done
on time making sure coursework was there
and if they got beyond college and if
they decide they want to go to
university I knew that one in 12
freshers from more disadvantaged
background drop out in their first year
of university and academics are
increasingly saying that actually their
undergraduates simply aren’t prepared
for the rigors of university and the
need to manage their own learning to be
problem solvers to be an analytical and
beyond university employers were saying
the same thing too
so every year the employee servic
employer server came out which said
pretty consistently over a decade the
50% of employers were concerned about
the teamwork and the problem-solving in
the analytical and self-management
skills of their school and college
leaders and as a naive new teacher I
looked at that and I looked around my
classroom and I just couldn’t understand
why we were so unconcerned about what
appeared to me to be a massive gaping
hole in the middle of the education that
we were providing for our young people
but as a new teacher what was I going to
do about this well actually swirling
around with all of these different ideas
of some of the things that might fill
that gap so everything from basic skills
to 21st century skills to advanced
skills basic skills and advanced skills
turn out to be the same thing maybe we
could have gone for some middling skills
or something like that but you’re
surrounded by these different ideas of
what you could do but how to make sense
of it and how to make sense of it in a
context and this is a reenactment in a
context where actually what you tried to
do is to get through a subject
curriculum and try and make sure your
students got good grades as well and so
on that basis I set up enabling
enterprise as a social enterprise eight
years ago and the idea was simple was
how can we support teachers to fill this
missing piece in their students
education because actually every teacher
is motivated to want the very best for
their students every teacher wants to
develop their students in the broadest
most helpful way and yet there was no
clear way of doing it and so what we’ve
done is try to make sense of all these
different things that go on out there so
we like confidence we like patience we
like humility we think kids should be
financially literate we think would be
great for their team players too and the
problem is when we try and do all of
these different things we forget the
fact that actually these are all very
different things and what we’re really
doing is slightly confusing the idea of
character knowledge and skills and I
think a great education does all of
these three things a great education
should help students to build their
character it should obviously equipment
with a great deal of knowledge and
understanding of the world so they can
navigate it effectively but they also
need skills
they need the ability to do things and I
think often that’s a bit in our
education that we forget so in enabling
enterprise what we do is we just focus
on those skills we know that what
students need the ability to do and
what’s really exciting is when you just
think about skills you find that
actually the skills that young people
need is a pretty consistent and so we
talked about a to enabling enterprise as
we talked about communication skills of
listening and presenting we talked about
problem solving creativity we talked
about self management in terms of
staying positive and aiming high so
having big goals having plans and then
actually having the strategies and tools
to Stikker achieving them and then
finally being err to work with others
with teamwork and leadership now these
all look like very sensible some would
say obvious things that we could be
building but what’s even more exciting
as we started digging into this at
enabling enterprises we realized to
really stretch a metaphor or to mix a
metaphor in fact if you crack in to any
one of those individual skills you
realize that they’re all built up of
these chunks everything is built up of
chunks and once you break down the
chunks of say taking team working
instead of just doing team work
activities think about teaching taking
interns helping out with different jobs
maybe how to facilitate a team meeting
you realize that these are completely
teachable so if we break these skills
apart we realize that you can teach them
in just the same rigorous way as you
would anything else so we know there’s a
massive gap on a big screen now I
realize it looks like I’m smirking it
wasn’t a smirk at this point and so we
know there’s a gap we know that there’s
these skills that would fill the gap we
know we can break them down into
teachable chunks and so the question is
why was why aren’t we doing it why isn’t
this just a part of education and I
think there’s some barriers at there’s
firstly there’s practical barriers right
there’s a lot in a school curriculum
schools have limited resources they’ve
limited time they’ve limited money of
course you can’t do everything but
enabling enterprise in this last year
alone has worked with almost 300 schools
perfectly normal primary and secondary
schools and 85,000 students in them and
we found that that’s not really a reason
for those students not to take part so
maybe then it’s something deeper
maybe there’s some sort of philosophical
barrier so maybe on one end people think
of you know education errs you know
producing economically efficient units
or children students and which is
definitely one end of a spectrum at the
other end we might say actually it’s all
about developing a rich cultural and
spiritual and moral appreciation which
is the other but I think whichever end
you sit on if you care about students as
economic units and for the record I’d
that that isn’t my driver then actually
of course we want the skills because
employers have said those skills are
essential if on the other hand we care
about that wider development well
actually you still need the skills
because that’s what makes it possible
for students to access and make the most
of their time in school so it’s not
something philosophical so what is it
and over the last year when I’ve been
thinking and writing about this and
trying to draw together our experience I
think what’s really crystallized is
there are three myths that we need to
get over if we’re really going to take
this stuff seriously if we’re going to
think differently about our education
system and the three myths are often
quite hard to pin down the first is this
idea that skills are innate so we are
just born with them and that might seem
silly when I say out loud but actually
we talk very easily about natural
leaders natural communicators natural
team players and actually I think
there’s an element where we assume and
we mix up personality and skill the
characteristics we have and our ability
to do things so for example we might
often presume that an introvert can’t be
a leader in fact the evidence is that
introverts are often more effective
leaders or equally we might have seem
that someone who’s neurotic wouldn’t be
able to be able to manage a team in fact
again there’s no evidence of those two
things are linked so we need to get
beyond this idea that skills are innate
because we’re seeing increasingly in all
sorts of fields including sports
including academic qualifications we’re
seeing that actually deliberate practice
is much more likely to be correlated
with having a skill than any sort of
innate characteristic but if we get over
that we have this idea that well maybe
you can build
skills but very hard to do it directly
we sort of had this idea that you saw
picked these things of up bias maces so
if you do enough activities and this is
stretching a biology metaphor now and we
all have permeable membranes for these
experiences we can over time by doing
lots of things build up a high level of
competence and of course it gives more
opportunities but actually it’s a really
really inefficient way of learning it’s
basically the same as saying the best
way for children to learn to read is to
unleash them in a library and we sort of
hope that over time they pick up the
right Burke made our teach each other I
don’t know but you know that’s the best
we can do so we’ll lock them in that
library until they come out as
proficient readers well the third idea
which is sort of a hangover I guess from
some entrepreneurial thinking is this
idea that the skills lie latent there
deep within us and in the right
opportunity emerges suddenly we’ll be
able to do it again it doesn’t really
there’s no evidence for that there’s no
evidence we have these things innately
and that we can just bring them to the
fore when we need to but actually these
these myths really drive a lot of how we
think about these skills in education
and what we really need to do if we’re
going to make a breakthrough and we’re
going to get to every child and every
young person to build these skills we
need to make a big leap in our thinking
we need to stop thinking about these
skills is nice to have things but maybe
their personality and instead think
about them in the same way we think
about two skills that we are very
comfortable with teaching and that is
literacy the ability to read and write
and numeracy the ability to work with
numbers and of course when you apply
those myths to anything to do with
literacy or numeracy we immediately see
how silly they are and what we’ve seen
increasingly is that actually when you
take that and you take that completely
different viewpoint on these skills in
our education system
there are six things that we need to
dramatically change about how mainstream
schooling thinks about these skills
first is that we need to keep it simple
we need to be focused consistently on a
single set of eight skills because if we
don’t do that then actually we continue
to get confused about what we’re
teaching we teach in different ways we
need to start really young so enabling
enterprise works with kids from as young
as three years old now
years old you’re not worried particular
about employability but of course if a
three-year-old can interact with their
peers if they can be happy and confident
sharing their ideas and you’re putting
them on a completely different
trajectory for the rest their time in
school so we start young then we keep
going we measure it so in the same way
that you teach reading effectively by
knowing a student’s reading age if you
know what a student can and can’t do in
these skills of course you can work out
what level they’re working at in there
as well which means that you can then
focus really tightly on the next thing
that they need to learn so if the next
thing that they need to learn to become
a better presenter is how torando is for
a self conscious easing this example
here they’re actually how do you stand
how do you talk how do you put your
points in logical order we can break
these things down we can teach exactly
the thing and the student needs to learn
next then we keep practicing it so we
reinforce it and we reinforce it in lots
of different settings and we bring it to
life by linking those skills built in
the class and we have to link it to the
real world we have to be taking our
young people out of the classroom into
employers and we have to be taking
employers into the classroom because
that’s the only way to build the
transferability those skills so we know
now that these skills are teachable we
know what it would take to do it in
schools across the country a neighboring
enterprises said we’ve seen it work now
with in excess of 250,000 students so
for the last eight years so we know it
works so what would it take for this to
be something that every student got in
it’s a matter of course I think we need
to believe three things collectively the
first is that we need to believe that
these essential skills are as important
as any other part of a child’s time in
school and we need to put them at the
heart of learning the second thing and
actually this is a more contentious
because we rarely have arguments about
people who don’t think the skills are
important but we need to believe that
every student can build them we need to
have that expectation just as we expect
every child can be literate and numerate
when they leave school so they need to
have these skills and thirdly we needed
more of a common language and shared
expectations about what that looks like
and so we’re working with about 50 other
organizations now to try and have that
same language same expectations so our
work can reinforce itself
we’ve got a long way to go so enabling
enterprises in 1.2 percent of English
schools which is you know sobering after
eight years of work but actually the
development of literacy numeracy should
give us great hope because you know a
hundred years ago it was thought aid
that most people probably couldn’t
become literate or numerous and actually
would that even be a sensible use of
resources to try and get people to that
stage and actually what we’ve seen since
we made that commitment is rounds of
development of reading ages of
standardised grammar of standardized
mathematic notation which has allowed us
to get to a point where actually this is
an expectation for everyone and we’ll
need to do that because in the future
these skills are only going to become
more important it’s become very usual to
talk now about how knowledge rich jobs
are going to be less important because
automation and algorithms make them say
but actually our education system isn’t
bouncing it out by developing the skills
that students will need and the things
that would differentiate them from
machines and we’re not doing that in a
consistent way that we need to so
there’s a lot to look forward to but I
often find myself thinking back to my
original class ten years ago and many of
them I keep in touch with many of you
sheer force of energy and hard work to
really get ahead but I look at them and
I look at my experience of school and I
think actually that those students
haven’t necessarily achieved the
potential that they could have had and I
wish that I could have gone back ten
years earlier still to when they were
just five or six years old and they’re
still building their understanding the
world and where they fitted in when
there’s still time to get in early to
build empathy and resilience because the
jobs that they get now aren’t the jobs
they could have got they they fall
behind their wealthy appears when they
don’t show the essential skills from the
outset and then get marked as the one to
watch and what I wish is that for all of
our students we weren’t so quick to
assume their capacity without building
these skills what we should do for every
child along with building their literacy
and their numeracy is ensure they leave
the school equipped with a full set of
essential skills because we can thank
you very much
[Applause]
[Applause]
well good morning
the story of enabling enterprise and and
this story really begins a decade ago
and at the time I was a very fresh-faced
new teacher to the extent that I have 14
year old students who looked decidedly
older than me I often got told to tuck
my shirt in and on one memorable
occasion deputy head stuck a head in and
asked who the responsible adult in the
room was which would have been fine had
I not been mid lesson teaching from the
front and there’s a new teacher there’s
a sort of new teacher bingo that you
take off particularly if you’re working
in a in a more challenging school see no
child throws Seng at you tick child
tries to escape through window tick
their child sets like to textbook tick
but actually what struck me more than
those individual incidents was a space a
growing sense of dissonance and a
dissonance between what I was seeing in
the classroom my 14 and 15 year old
students and the growing reality that
actually they were about to embark on
the rest of their lives
and in my classroom that sort of gap
manifested itself as you know being
unable to run a lesson without managing
the seating plan and working out exactly
who was friends with who at that
particular moment or when I’d ask the
question no one would put their hands up
and that was just about acceptable in
the classroom because we were marching
towards getting a good grade but what
would come after that after that might
be college and ins knew they in college
they wouldn’t have the same sort of
individual teacher looking out for them
trying to make sure everything was done
on time making sure coursework was there
and if they got beyond college and if
they decide they want to go to
university I knew that one in 12
freshers from more disadvantaged
background drop out in their first year
of university and academics are
increasingly saying that actually their
undergraduates simply aren’t prepared
for the rigors of university and the
need to manage their own learning to be
problem solvers to be an analytical and
beyond university employers were saying
the same thing too
so every year the employee servic
employer server came out which said
pretty consistently over a decade the
50% of employers were concerned about
the teamwork and the problem-solving in
the analytical and self-management
skills of their school and college
leaders and as a naive new teacher I
looked at that and I looked around my
classroom and I just couldn’t understand
why we were so unconcerned about what
appeared to me to be a massive gaping
hole in the middle of the education that
we were providing for our young people
but as a new teacher what was I going to
do about this well actually swirling
around with all of these different ideas
of some of the things that might fill
that gap so everything from basic skills
to 21st century skills to advanced
skills basic skills and advanced skills
turn out to be the same thing maybe we
could have gone for some middling skills
or something like that but you’re
surrounded by these different ideas of
what you could do but how to make sense
of it and how to make sense of it in a
context and this is a reenactment in a
context where actually what you tried to
do is to get through a subject
curriculum and try and make sure your
students got good grades as well and so
on that basis I set up enabling
enterprise as a social enterprise eight
years ago and the idea was simple was
how can we support teachers to fill this
missing piece in their students
education because actually every teacher
is motivated to want the very best for
their students every teacher wants to
develop their students in the broadest
most helpful way and yet there was no
clear way of doing it and so what we’ve
done is try to make sense of all these
different things that go on out there so
we like confidence we like patience we
like humility we think kids should be
financially literate we think would be
great for their team players too and the
problem is when we try and do all of
these different things we forget the
fact that actually these are all very
different things and what we’re really
doing is slightly confusing the idea of
character knowledge and skills and I
think a great education does all of
these three things a great education
should help students to build their
character it should obviously equipment
with a great deal of knowledge and
understanding of the world so they can
navigate it effectively but they also
need skills
they need the ability to do things and I
think often that’s a bit in our
education that we forget so in enabling
enterprise what we do is we just focus
on those skills we know that what
students need the ability to do and
what’s really exciting is when you just
think about skills you find that
actually the skills that young people
need is a pretty consistent and so we
talked about a to enabling enterprise as
we talked about communication skills of
listening and presenting we talked about
problem solving creativity we talked
about self management in terms of
staying positive and aiming high so
having big goals having plans and then
actually having the strategies and tools
to Stikker achieving them and then
finally being err to work with others
with teamwork and leadership now these
all look like very sensible some would
say obvious things that we could be
building but what’s even more exciting
as we started digging into this at
enabling enterprises we realized to
really stretch a metaphor or to mix a
metaphor in fact if you crack in to any
one of those individual skills you
realize that they’re all built up of
these chunks everything is built up of
chunks and once you break down the
chunks of say taking team working
instead of just doing team work
activities think about teaching taking
interns helping out with different jobs
maybe how to facilitate a team meeting
you realize that these are completely
teachable so if we break these skills
apart we realize that you can teach them
in just the same rigorous way as you
would anything else so we know there’s a
massive gap on a big screen now I
realize it looks like I’m smirking it
wasn’t a smirk at this point and so we
know there’s a gap we know that there’s
these skills that would fill the gap we
know we can break them down into
teachable chunks and so the question is
why was why aren’t we doing it why isn’t
this just a part of education and I
think there’s some barriers at there’s
firstly there’s practical barriers right
there’s a lot in a school curriculum
schools have limited resources they’ve
limited time they’ve limited money of
course you can’t do everything but
enabling enterprise in this last year
alone has worked with almost 300 schools
perfectly normal primary and secondary
schools and 85,000 students in them and
we found that that’s not really a reason
for those students not to take part so
maybe then it’s something deeper
maybe there’s some sort of philosophical
barrier so maybe on one end people think
of you know education errs you know
producing economically efficient units
or children students and which is
definitely one end of a spectrum at the
other end we might say actually it’s all
about developing a rich cultural and
spiritual and moral appreciation which
is the other but I think whichever end
you sit on if you care about students as
economic units and for the record I’d
that that isn’t my driver then actually
of course we want the skills because
employers have said those skills are
essential if on the other hand we care
about that wider development well
actually you still need the skills
because that’s what makes it possible
for students to access and make the most
of their time in school so it’s not
something philosophical so what is it
and over the last year when I’ve been
thinking and writing about this and
trying to draw together our experience I
think what’s really crystallized is
there are three myths that we need to
get over if we’re really going to take
this stuff seriously if we’re going to
think differently about our education
system and the three myths are often
quite hard to pin down the first is this
idea that skills are innate so we are
just born with them and that might seem
silly when I say out loud but actually
we talk very easily about natural
leaders natural communicators natural
team players and actually I think
there’s an element where we assume and
we mix up personality and skill the
characteristics we have and our ability
to do things so for example we might
often presume that an introvert can’t be
a leader in fact the evidence is that
introverts are often more effective
leaders or equally we might have seem
that someone who’s neurotic wouldn’t be
able to be able to manage a team in fact
again there’s no evidence of those two
things are linked so we need to get
beyond this idea that skills are innate
because we’re seeing increasingly in all
sorts of fields including sports
including academic qualifications we’re
seeing that actually deliberate practice
is much more likely to be correlated
with having a skill than any sort of
innate characteristic but if we get over
that we have this idea that well maybe
you can build
skills but very hard to do it directly
we sort of had this idea that you saw
picked these things of up bias maces so
if you do enough activities and this is
stretching a biology metaphor now and we
all have permeable membranes for these
experiences we can over time by doing
lots of things build up a high level of
competence and of course it gives more
opportunities but actually it’s a really
really inefficient way of learning it’s
basically the same as saying the best
way for children to learn to read is to
unleash them in a library and we sort of
hope that over time they pick up the
right Burke made our teach each other I
don’t know but you know that’s the best
we can do so we’ll lock them in that
library until they come out as
proficient readers well the third idea
which is sort of a hangover I guess from
some entrepreneurial thinking is this
idea that the skills lie latent there
deep within us and in the right
opportunity emerges suddenly we’ll be
able to do it again it doesn’t really
there’s no evidence for that there’s no
evidence we have these things innately
and that we can just bring them to the
fore when we need to but actually these
these myths really drive a lot of how we
think about these skills in education
and what we really need to do if we’re
going to make a breakthrough and we’re
going to get to every child and every
young person to build these skills we
need to make a big leap in our thinking
we need to stop thinking about these
skills is nice to have things but maybe
their personality and instead think
about them in the same way we think
about two skills that we are very
comfortable with teaching and that is
literacy the ability to read and write
and numeracy the ability to work with
numbers and of course when you apply
those myths to anything to do with
literacy or numeracy we immediately see
how silly they are and what we’ve seen
increasingly is that actually when you
take that and you take that completely
different viewpoint on these skills in
our education system
there are six things that we need to
dramatically change about how mainstream
schooling thinks about these skills
first is that we need to keep it simple
we need to be focused consistently on a
single set of eight skills because if we
don’t do that then actually we continue
to get confused about what we’re
teaching we teach in different ways we
need to start really young so enabling
enterprise works with kids from as young
as three years old now
years old you’re not worried particular
about employability but of course if a
three-year-old can interact with their
peers if they can be happy and confident
sharing their ideas and you’re putting
them on a completely different
trajectory for the rest their time in
school so we start young then we keep
going we measure it so in the same way
that you teach reading effectively by
knowing a student’s reading age if you
know what a student can and can’t do in
these skills of course you can work out
what level they’re working at in there
as well which means that you can then
focus really tightly on the next thing
that they need to learn so if the next
thing that they need to learn to become
a better presenter is how torando is for
a self conscious easing this example
here they’re actually how do you stand
how do you talk how do you put your
points in logical order we can break
these things down we can teach exactly
the thing and the student needs to learn
next then we keep practicing it so we
reinforce it and we reinforce it in lots
of different settings and we bring it to
life by linking those skills built in
the class and we have to link it to the
real world we have to be taking our
young people out of the classroom into
employers and we have to be taking
employers into the classroom because
that’s the only way to build the
transferability those skills so we know
now that these skills are teachable we
know what it would take to do it in
schools across the country a neighboring
enterprises said we’ve seen it work now
with in excess of 250,000 students so
for the last eight years so we know it
works so what would it take for this to
be something that every student got in
it’s a matter of course I think we need
to believe three things collectively the
first is that we need to believe that
these essential skills are as important
as any other part of a child’s time in
school and we need to put them at the
heart of learning the second thing and
actually this is a more contentious
because we rarely have arguments about
people who don’t think the skills are
important but we need to believe that
every student can build them we need to
have that expectation just as we expect
every child can be literate and numerate
when they leave school so they need to
have these skills and thirdly we needed
more of a common language and shared
expectations about what that looks like
and so we’re working with about 50 other
organizations now to try and have that
same language same expectations so our
work can reinforce itself
we’ve got a long way to go so enabling
enterprises in 1.2 percent of English
schools which is you know sobering after
eight years of work but actually the
development of literacy numeracy should
give us great hope because you know a
hundred years ago it was thought aid
that most people probably couldn’t
become literate or numerous and actually
would that even be a sensible use of
resources to try and get people to that
stage and actually what we’ve seen since
we made that commitment is rounds of
development of reading ages of
standardised grammar of standardized
mathematic notation which has allowed us
to get to a point where actually this is
an expectation for everyone and we’ll
need to do that because in the future
these skills are only going to become
more important it’s become very usual to
talk now about how knowledge rich jobs
are going to be less important because
automation and algorithms make them say
but actually our education system isn’t
bouncing it out by developing the skills
that students will need and the things
that would differentiate them from
machines and we’re not doing that in a
consistent way that we need to so
there’s a lot to look forward to but I
often find myself thinking back to my
original class ten years ago and many of
them I keep in touch with many of you
sheer force of energy and hard work to
really get ahead but I look at them and
I look at my experience of school and I
think actually that those students
haven’t necessarily achieved the
potential that they could have had and I
wish that I could have gone back ten
years earlier still to when they were
just five or six years old and they’re
still building their understanding the
world and where they fitted in when
there’s still time to get in early to
build empathy and resilience because the
jobs that they get now aren’t the jobs
they could have got they they fall
behind their wealthy appears when they
don’t show the essential skills from the
outset and then get marked as the one to
watch and what I wish is that for all of
our students we weren’t so quick to
assume their capacity without building
these skills what we should do for every
child along with building their literacy
and their numeracy is ensure they leave
the school equipped with a full set of
essential skills because we can thank
you very much
[Applause]
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