"Remember that your thoughts become reality, make yours good ones"
The Enterprise Centre has been developing and delivering creative enterprise at school programmes for over 10 years, long before the Davies review suggested it should be compulsory within the education framework. The senior team have more than 60 years collective experience working at all levels with varying abilities in different locations across the North West. (see our case studies )
We believe that all delivery should be tailored to the individual needs of the client and their learners, therefore, each enterprise in school project is designed in consultation with the head of school and others that they may recommend.
We are totally committed to the facilitation of learning and we have a passion for developing enterprising individuals as we know that this will give them better tools by which they can successfully manage their lives and their achievements.
We reward our students by ensuring the work they undertake also carries accreditation and we hold Centre Status with Education Developments International Awarding Body. We do not see any barriers to attaining these recognitions we only look for new ways to deliver and assess so that we can help people to be the best they can be. The Enterprise Centre was one of the first training organisations in the UK to accredit this type of activity at school mainly due to the fact that we were part of the original design team working with the awarding body who wrote the standards in 2005.
The first enterprise project in Tottington High School came about almost by accident, the enterprise coordinator at the time asked if we could help to set up a social enterprise at school. He knew we were one of the experts in the field as Alison’s daughter attended at the time. We did this and you can read the case study here.
The DfES were so pleased with the work we had done that they sponsored The Cantilever group in the publication of “Learning by doing in Social Enterprise at School” which can be seen on Amazons web site. It is quite intriguing that the blonde haired girl in the picture on page 6, is in fact Dannielle Hornsby, daughter of Alison and she is now training to be a teacher within Primary education herself.
And so it was decided that many more creative enterprising projects could be developed and TEC had both the passion and the expertise to do this in a really creative way. We wanted to ensure that all carried accreditation so that the learners had maximum benefits from their involvement and so we worked very closely with the Qualifications Curriculum Authority (QCA) and Awarding bodies throughout the process.
Our work in Primary school was another first of its kind. Through a chance meeting in 2006 as part of another project, Helen Arya ( National Leader for Education Excellence) asked if we would be interested in developing a full enterprise curriculum to underpin the current National Curriculum. She already delivered to a Key skills agenda so the match seemed perfect. First we needed to pilot some projects, to seek further permission from the QCA to accredit and to evaluate the full outcomes. The pilot case study can be viewed here. We have now delivered many enterprise activity programmes at school, the full curriculum is in place and working, the staff have received training so they can roll it out themselves. 100 students at year 5 or 6 have achieved a VRQ at level 2 in an enterprise related topic. The last of these was The Insect Hotel you can read about that here.
More recently we have been working with The Oasis Academy. There are a number of issues that students face in the transition from the ordinary schools to a large Academy. Oasis want to support all students even those who sometime find things a little more difficult and so asked TEC to help with some self-esteem and confidence issues. We designed a bespoke programme which developed them as enterprising individuals with focus, direction and solution thinking approaches. The students achieved at level 3 in Personal Mastery and the achievement was reported in The Oldham Evening Chronicle on 10th July. You can access all our case studies and some tools that you may like to use yourselves here.
