Back in April, Tina McKenzie, policy chair at the Federation of Small Businesses, wrote a piece for FE Week calling for enterprise education to be embedded in college curriculums. Her starting point was blunt. Enterprise education isn’t part of the national curriculum in England, and sixth forms and FE colleges are less likely than schools to give young people any experience of it at all.
She’s right, and she’s not the first to say it. We’ve been hearing versions of that argument for the twenty-odd years we’ve worked in this sector. Every curriculum review raises hopes, and every one ends with enterprise somewhere in the “nice to have” pile. The latest review did a lot for financial literacy, which is welcome (budgeting and mortgages are going into maths and a statutory primary citizenship curriculum), but knowing how a mortgage works and knowing how to create something people will pay for are two different skills.
So we could keep waiting for a mandate. Or teachers could start now, with what’s already on the timetable.
The time problem
Ask any teacher why enterprise doesn’t happen in their school and you’ll get the same answer: there’s no room. Schemes of work are full, exam specs are full, and nobody has a spare afternoon to write a new unit on business planning.
That’s why enterprise in England tends to show up as a one-off: a competition, an enterprise day, a Dragons’ Den in the last week of summer term. Those can be brilliant, but they tell students that enterprise is something that happens outside proper lessons. And the students who’d get the most from it are often the ones least likely to sign up.
Most of the raw material for enterprise is already being taught, though. It just isn’t being pointed at anything.
Where enterprise is already hiding
Take maths. Students already work with percentages, ratios and negative numbers. Put those in a cashflow forecast for a small business and you’ve taught the same objectives, plus one of the most common reasons real businesses fail (they run out of cash while still being profitable on paper).
Media and art students already study audiences and how images persuade. Ask them who a product is for and what that person actually cares about, and they’re doing customer research and marketing whether anyone calls it that or not.
Our go-to example for value is toothpaste. There are hundreds of kinds on the supermarket shelf, and none of those companies is really selling toothpaste. One sells whiter teeth, another sells less sensitivity, and the rest sell a feeling about your own mouth. A Year 8 class can get to that in ten minutes, and once they’ve seen it, they start noticing it everywhere. That habit of looking for the value behind the product is enterprise thinking, and it fits in a lesson that was going to happen anyway.
Value Literacy
This is the idea behind Value Literacy, an approach we’re developing at IOEE. It maps short, ready-made Enterprise Tasks onto the subjects schools and colleges already teach, so a maths teacher gets a cashflow task that hits their existing objectives, and a media teacher gets an audience task that does the same. The tasks drop into current schemes of work with no extra prep, so teachers aren’t being asked to become business experts or rewrite their planning.
We’re also adding short “why this matters” notes alongside the tasks. Students ask “when will I ever use this?” all the time, and it’s a fair question. A few lines explaining how a topic creates value in their lives (from primary right through to sixth form) gives teachers a ready answer and gives students a reason to care.
Nobody’s waiting for a curriculum change to start, and nobody’s adding a new subject. Enterprise gets threaded through the lessons students are sitting in already, so every student gets some of it, not just the ones who volunteer for the competition.
For colleges and sixth forms
Tina McKenzie’s point about post-16 deserves attention. The curriculum review left post-16 largely untouched on life skills, and that’s the stage where young people are closest to making real decisions about work, self-employment and what they want to do with their lives.
Colleges have more flexibility than schools in some ways, and the embedded approach works there too. Where a college wants to go further, IOEE’s IdeaSpark programme takes students through the same value-led thinking in depth, with regulated qualifications at Levels 2 and 3 attached, so the work they do counts for something on their CV.
Start with one lesson
If you teach in a school or college and this sounds useful, the easiest way in is to pick one subject and one task and see how it lands. We’d like to hear from teachers and leaders who want to try Value Literacy in their setting, and from anyone already doing something similar. Get in touch with the IOEE team and we’ll talk you through it.