I am delighted to be here this afternoon.

I want to start by admitting that I feel somewhat out of my depth already.

A personal view of Enterprise in Education before an audience of professional enterprise educators.

In terms of the practicalities of delivering enterprise in education I suspect everyone in this room knows more about it than I do.

So having admitted my own inexperience of the details of delivery - let me do what most politicians do in the circumstances - take refuge in the big picture.

However I want to try and avoid the fate of too many politicians when the deal in the big picture - by combining it with predictable platitudes.

In this respect I hope to be different I hope to combine the big picture - not with platitudes but with boldness.

Firstly, I am not seeking to be critical in any way of Peter Peacock, who has done an impressive job.

Secondly, I am not going to talk much about primary schools - who in general I think are doing an outstanding job.

My theme for this afternoon is that enterprise educators are the revolutionaries subversively promoting a new sort of education system in our schools; a subtle but subversive campaign to champion learning over teaching and personal development over accreditation.

But before I get to explore my theme of Enterprise educators as the revolutionaries - the Che Guevaras of Scottish education system.

Let me start by going back to the beginning with my own experience of enterprise education over a quarter of a century ago in a Scottish comprehensive - Park Mains in Erskine.

My plan for this afternoon is to use my own experience to suggest first that we have already come a long way, secondly to talk directly about the purpose of enterprise education and its revolutionary potential in our secondary schools.

Thirdly, I will look at the forces of conservatism ranged against you the revolutionaries, and finally to look at how the revolutionary impact of enterprise education can be maintained in the future.

But let me start with my first theme, the optimistic one, about how far we have come.

My Experience
Some time in early 1979, no doubt with the arguments over devolution dominating the public domain, as a 4th year pupil headed then for Medicine, I was one of a team of four who took part in a Sunday Times sponsored business competition where we formed the senior management team of a hypothetical company.

Needless to say, of the four of us, I am now a politician, one is a Cambridge anthropology don, the third is, I believe, a medical researcher and the fourth an Arts Administrator - not many entrepreneurs - but I suspect all of us would claim to be enterprising in our own fields.

But what struck me about that experience was quite how clueless I was about the world of business.

Quite simply I felt wholly out of my depth in any of the decisions we were called upon to make.

It is also fair to say that business competition was totally disconnected from my experience of formal careers advice. When it came to formal careers advice I recall a late November visit to Renfrew Town Hall Careers Evening where I paraded around a range of Admissions Officers who no doubt would have preferred to be elsewhere.

I am told I showed an undue interest in joining the Diplomatic Corp, but I am sure there are civil servants who remain grateful to this day that I did not pursue that particular course of action.

But in late 78 early 79 contemplating a career in business (and particularly the risks associated with it) was absolutely not the done thing.

One’s aspirations were firmly fixed by parental and teacher expectations on the professions, and the security it brought.

And that was true across the board, irrespective of aspiration or talent.

The whole process had a bias to the career choices that were explicable to a school child and many, many careers in business do not lend themselves to the simplicities of train driver, nurse, teacher, shop keeper.

So choosing a career at 14 - any career if it is thought of as life long - may lead to bias against business - but I will come back to that

Let me finish on my personal exodus towards enterprise. In my case it was another 15 years following stints in medical school, a study of economics and history, industrial relations, work in the public and voluntary sectors, I finally went to Business school.

Probably little more equipped than I had been in 4th Year to understand the basics of business.

But I turned down public policy third degree in favour of an MBA because somewhere I suspected I had an, unschooled but real, entrepreneurial instinct.

I am sure many of you who teach in the field of enterprise education will know this feeling.

The instinct was there but it took study at Business school for me to acquire the range of ancillary technical skills.

But crucially my MBA did not in itself change much. Importantly, I suspect my MBA would have counted for nought unless I have moved directly into a major consultancy firm where I had the chance to practice (admittedly lubricated by a generous salary) the skills I had learned at business school. Indeed, it was then in my early thirties that I served my only apprenticeship, applying the skills I had learned at business school.

And if you then fast forward another five or six years to my time as an adviser to Donald Dewar and later as a Minister, we were keen that the first Scottish Administration should bring together Enterprise and Life Long Learning in a single ministry for the first time - we believed anywhere in the world.

It was to be a tangible signal that in the 21st Century we would compete, all of us, on brain not brawn.

So all Human capital and skills acquisition after the post compulsory stage should be linked to enterprise to put knowledge and ideas and lifelong learning at the top of the economic and productivity agenda.

But it was with some surprise that I discovered as Enterprise and Lifelong Learning Minister I was also responsible for enterprise education within schools under the ambit of the old Business Education Partnerships.

I have to admit I was not particularly keen to hold on to any direct responsibility for what happened in the classroom - as one labelled the ‘minister for everything” I felt I already had enough on my plate.

And in many ways I hold the same view today - because if enterprise education is not something the education ministry is comfortable with then we have a problem.

One more anecdote about my time in government.

I have already eluded to the fact that I had had a few careers or at least a few jobs before entering Parliament, and they embraced the public, private and voluntary sectors.

And that winding road all seemed very far from Renfrew Town Hall in 1978 and Maths, Physics and Chemistry ‘O’ Grades.

My own crooked career path certainly contributed to my own conviction about the desirability of establishing Careers Scotland.

As a well paid management consultant, I was lucky enough to benefit from extensive personal development opportunities, on the job skills training, psychometric testing, present skills and all the panoply of self awareness and self discovery that goes under guise of modern management.

It occurred to me more than once in my 30s that my subsequent Careers choices really diminished the significance of the subject choices I had made at 12 or 14, or even the degrees I ended up completing.

The paper qualifications although seemingly important at the time have proved immensely less important determinants of my career path than my progressive realisation of what my skill sets were and who I was.

My own personal experience did contribute to my convictions about the need for the establishment of Careers Scotland as a universal all age service.

Because If we are all going to have three careers and eight jobs, then a single interview at the end of 2nd year with a kindly woman with knowledge of UCAS forms probably cannot meet the challenges of today.

And so although Careers Scotland sometimes apparently feels the ‘poor relation’ within Scottish Enterprise, the much more fundamental insight is that we live in a world where human capital is ‘all’ and people will regularly change careers.

They will be more productive at careers for which they are motivated and have aptitude - and they need to have the opportunity to change to suit their life circumstances.

All of this requires at least a brokering of such services by government.

It would be appallingly inefficient for only the wealthy minority in the private sector were able to avail themselves of services to help them know themselves better, identify their skill set and achieve a change of direction.

Which brings me to my final personal anecdote.

Let me role forward 25 years to last Friday afternoon where Linda and I were at St Catherine’s Primary School in Gallowhill, participating in a Global Citizenship project involving team work, creativity, active listening, self awareness and presentation skills - all a taster for a social enterprise business which will subsequently be transferred to the local community.

All a million miles from the needlework I had known in Primary 7 on Friday afternoons.

And I say all this to demonstrate a keen awareness for how much I think has changed, but that said I want now to turn to my central theme that enterprise educators are, if not the revolutionaries of the Scottish Education system today, they are certainly its subversives.

Enterprise Educators as Revolutionaries

Why Enterprise Educators as revolutionaries?

Because I think enterprise education at its best invites you to see the whole school experience with different eyes.

In any of you have not yet seen the Motorcycle Diaries of the life of the young Che Guevara I commend it to you.

The whole movie is a metaphor for learning to see with different eyes, because I think enterprise education is subversive in getting to the very heart of what the personal learning experience should be about in the 21st Century.

I will later come back to those in the Curriculum Review Group shortly to report to Peter Peacock — not the revolutionaries but the mediators of the system who are trying find a peaceful solution to the curriculum challenge, or, more accurately, the future of the classroom experience.

Here I want to focus particularly on secondary education and the early years of secondary education where the challenges are greatest.

So why are enterprise educators the revolutionaries - well what do we know about the prevailing environment.

* We know is that secondary school is not motivating too many young people,

* We know secondary schools are excessively academic for some and overly focussed on learning in a subject-centred way

* And thirdly we know there is insufficient focus on capabilities.

These are not just minor challenges; they go to the heart of the secondary learning experience and environment.

Secondary schools in Scotland still concentrate on the transfer of subject knowledge and the assumption those skills and capabilities will follow, i.e. critical thinking, creativity, etc. can be left to take care of themselves.

In fact there is little evidence that skills and capabilities can take care of themselves.

Enterprise education is revolutionary in the way it starts with skills and capabilities rather than subject knowledge.

So enterprise education throws down a fundamental challenge.

So what can the revolutionaries teach the rest of the system?

Looking to the future.

* Firstly, we need the school experience to be more, not less, intellectually demanding

* building skills and capabilities is not about dumbing down

* But we have an important problem of public perception.

* Secondly, assessment - we have to stop being seduced into measuring what is easy rather what is important.

* Too much assessment in Scotland is not a good proxy for what we are trying to achieve. The pre-eminent example is Standard Grades. Arguably the whole panoply of Standard Grades retained because people are nervous of change rather than because that qualification has a meaningful purpose these days.

* Thirdly, and this returns to the motivational issue — in the world in which human capital our brain not our brawn matters. School is no longer your only chance to learn. Lifelong Learning means all of us have the opportunity to learn later in life - indeed we have to be willing to do so in a world where India and China have 4 million graduates each year willing to earn 5% of the wages we are paid here.

* But this does require schools to be motivating - turn a child off learning for life and you have stymied their ‘life chances’ for life-in the past, this has been true of lots of Scots.

* Fourthly, a too narrow subject focus can get in the way of true learning. The reductionist view of knowledge has always been about ever greater specialisation. It has served us well in the past in many ways — but has not served us well in encouraging systems thinking and creativity

* So subject learning cannot be the ‘be all and end all’ and mercifully it isn’t in enterprise education. Enterprise education is about multi disciplinary transformational learning, of which you need more rather than less.

* Fifthly, we need more personalised learning. We have talked about it for twenty years but we still have to make it a reality. Instead we have a political debate dominated by class sizes. It can be an old-fashioned and outdated debate compared to the pressing development of fully personalised learning where young people become active learners, where learning is a co-production rather than a transfer of knowledge from one mind to another.

On all of these, five dimensions

* skills and capabilities,
* rethinking assessment,
* motivating an individual for life long learning,
* encouraging more multi disciplinary learning and
* encouraging personalised learning

On all of these dimensions enterprise education prefigures some of the changes we need to see over the whole school curriculum.

Enterprise education has become the vital arena for those within the existing system willingness to elevate “the creation of an enquiring mind” to the centrepiece of the educational experience.

As I tried to highlight with my own experience, the “passport to life” is not necessarily certification, but motivation, discipline, self-belief.

But I can almost hear the howls of protest from teachers that politicians are part of the problem — and I think the answer to that is “Yes we are”.

Too many politicians and parents start where I started this evening with anecdotes based on their own experience - and our experience wasn’t about, at least not conscientiously, being active learners or seeking to develop an enquiring mind, it was about something altogether more narrow.

And so when some of the more ambitious ideas are talked about this evening and which are being currently explored by the Curriculum Review Group, shortly to report to Peter Peacock, were discussed at the Parliament’s Education committee the questions that followed were mostly about subjects e.g. why aren’t we teaching languages, why aren’t children taking enough sciences, what is the future of Gaelic with few seeing the paradox of their own obsession with the traditionalism of the overwhelmingly subject based approach.

And this brings me to my third point, why has progress by the revolutionaries within the system been so slow?

Because I think it is only from understanding the barriers to change that we understand the full revolutionary potential of enterprise education and its place in the curriculum.

If you see enterprise education as prefiguring what should be the future classroom experience,

Success is not about how many entrepreneurs you create but it is about the power of demonstration to colleagues, to parents, to pupils of the power of a different type of learning experience.

Have politicians got in the way of this?

Absolutely.

We have, both under the Tories and under Labour, put accountability before creativity
And too often we have failed to engage the profession

But before we all beat ourselves up for that or blame HMI, I think it’s important to understand why accountability rather than creativity and curriculum inflexibility rather than curriculum flexibility have proved so durable in recent years?

In part it is because the generation of people who came into the profession in the 1960’s committed to using the transforming powers of education to change children’s life chances and in the new comprehensives in the 1970’s, like Park Mains, the school I went to, where there was little guidance for the non certificate pupils. In the knowledge economy, the aspirations of all pupils have to matter.

So it became a touchstone that flexibility in the past too often meant neglect.

But past explanations should not become contemporary excuses.

Scottish Education that aspires to be the best cannot be the best based on simply good enterprise education if it’s boxed into the residual space in the crowded school timetable.

Enterprise in education if it is to have meaningful long-term impact needs to be about a prefiguring of much more radical change.

But meanwhile enterprise education makes a powerful statement about the school of the future.

Enterprise education creates an environment, which simulates the corporate, or workplace environment and increasingly the schools of the future should be more like modern work places.

A place that brokers learning services provided by itself and others, rather than, as in the past, an imitator of the training grounds for professions, with all the standardised transfer knowledge that that implies.

It is not enough to focus on active learners-too much of the model is about ideas poured into an “empty” vessel.

So what are the forces of conservatism?

The sources of resistance to change?

Why is it so hard to achieve what so many of us want to see in the school curriculum?

Here I want to share with you some of my experience on the Parliament’s Education Committee as we tried to get to grips with curriculum inflexibility in the secondary years.

Our exploration of the issues was, and is, highly instructive.

The publication a few years ago of the flexibility circular was a welcome sign after 20 years of heavy conformity.

The first permissive tone for almost 20 years — and yet tragically the main manifestation to date has been an acceleration of early accreditation not a rethinking of the role of assessment.

Earlier and earlier certification shifts the focus more and more onto accreditation and less and less onto the acquisition of soft skills which are increasingly the key to success in life.

So in the Education committee I was frankly puzzled by the significant numbers of people in and around the system who were committed to significant change.

People genuinely attracted by real change but held back by real impediments.

So what were those forces of conservatism?

For the Scottish Executive - it is, implicitly at least, the fault of schools who are too reluctant to use the flexibility that is given to them.

From learning in TeachingScotland it is the conservatism of the Directors in Education who are more comfortable with the standardised subject based approaches to teaching as opposed to learning of the past.

From the same Directors of Education we heard it is the fault of the Executive because it’s much vaunted commitment to curricular flexibility means little when it comes to leaving the qualification structure in the pattern of the school day, little changed.

From individual head teachers we heard they couldn’t afford to adopt curriculum flexibility because if a child moves school what happens if a child enters a school operating in the old model?

So the change needs to be led from the top.

From teachers we heard this enforced conservatism reflects the attitude of the Inspectorate who still assess us based accreditation as opposed to achievement

From politicians we heard it’s the fault of the press and parents who will see revolutionary change as simply an exercise dumbing down

And from almost everyone we heard it’s a fault of the universities who whatever their warm words still use traditional assessment as the gateway to further learning.

It is perhaps little wonder faced with such a blame culture the entrepreneurs within the system have decide to just do it and establish demonstration projects of that different educational experience and have simply labelled the whole exercise “enterprise education.”

It may come as a disappointment to Scotland’s entrepreneurs that you are not setting out to raise Scotland’s business birth rate or create a new generation of Andrew Carnegies but you are doing something altogether more valuable.

You are demonstrating to all the various powers that be how valuable, motivating and relevant the school learning environment can be.

I would be genuinely interested in the question time to hear from the members of the audience about the routes into overcoming these forces of conservatism and whether it be the Executive, or LearningTeachingScotland, or Directors of Education or the Inspectorate or parents or Universities.

So turning to my last and final point about how we now look to the future.

We do need to galvanise the forces of change.

If we do not, we risk slipping behind those nations and regions who have found ways to move beyond the old ways and think big picture.

Perhaps it does not matter that you cannot measure the improvement in self-esteem what matters is that is has happened.

Perhaps the key contribution of enterprise education at the moment is what it has to teach us about the issue of pupil motivation.

Learning is changing.

More attention is being given to individual learning needs and teaching increasingly geared to accommodating a variety of learning styles and situations.

This is right in a world where most of what we know about “how the brain learns” has been discovered since 1985 and of course most teachers graduated long before then.

Flexibility is increasing with the greater use of specialist resources, digital equipment and computers; home based study and greater flexibility and complexity in the management of learning.

Students are becoming more responsible for their own learning and education is expected to monitor and support individual learning programmes while at the same time ensuring motivation, ability and continuity.

And these changing imperatives about learning are linked to the economic imperatives of knowledge based economy.

Businesses require people with skills of inventiveness and the work force needs to be flexible and able to learn new skills.

In the economy, the move from productivity to creativity is encouraging a different view of the learning environment.

The demand for more flexibility, freelance and home working is also influencing the learning environments.

These new ways of working demand qualities of self motivation, independence, self reliance and adaptability as well as organisational, entrepreneurial, and practical skills to make the technology work and achieve the desired outcomes.

The evidence, as many here will know, increasingly suggests that children often learn best from each other - for example, increasingly British children can be taught French by French children by video conference or a Nobel Prize winner teach Physics by video conferencing.

But are revolutionary changes under way in how people learn an appreciation that we will never win by slogging it out with India.

Creativity over productivity represents the high ground. We need a greater awareness of technology not as an answer but as the creator of a rich interactive environment that will characterise our work and leisure spaces.

This was brilliantly captured for me by the following provocative illustration.

Imagine for a moment how 100 hundred years ago Glasgow’s best surgeon, if put down in today’s modern Western surgery unit - he or she would be able to do little more than to wipe the forehead of a patient and make tea.

But if you took one of Scotland’s best teachers of 100 years ago and set him or her down in a Hillhead High School classroom today, they could probably stand up and teach many of the lessons.

So I suggest the pace of change needs to quicken -

Certain imperatives are key

1. the need for early intervention , watering the seed in the earliest years

2. recognition and support for winning teachers.

The ability to teach is immeasurably more important than the metrics we use; since we all know a good teacher when we see one but when we can’t measure it.

So we opt for metrics of what we can measure but are probably much less relevant in terms of educational outcomes.

Let me make just one final self evident observation but which should not be neglected - Enterprise in Education sits alongside education for citizenship.

Creativity and team work are the corner stones of enterprise in education - it’s about building self confidence, self awareness, a can-do attitude and a capacity to learn.

All of these are much more important than being enamoured of making money.

It is vital that enterprise education develops a sense of collaboration, a sense of community and shared responsibility, all virtues that will carry one far in the commercial arena as elsewhere in life.

Of course there are others matters on which I have said little but we might to return to in questions.

Not least how one brings about equal life chances for the 1 in 50 children born to a drug abusing parent who may lack vital parenting skills, or the academic vocational divide, or the role of leadership in schools.

But let me conclude here by reflecting on what I have tried to do today

* Firstly, to acknowledge how far we have come in the quarter century since I was at school
* Secondly, that Enterprise educators are indeed the revolutionaries of Scottish Education today
* Thirdly, to look at the forces of conservatism, notably around the curriculum and the absence of curriculum flexibility that is ranged against those revolutionary forces
* Fourthly, to look at some of the challenges for those revolutionary enterprise educators who are reshaping the service in tomorrow’s image.

Let me end with a provocative question.

When I was preparing for this seminar I browsed extensively the website of the Department for Education, the DFEE in England.

Interestingly I could not find a single speech on Enterprise education amongst over a hundred by their ministers.

There are of course three explanations

1. Scotland is indeed far ahead, at least in terms of Ministerial awareness, of the Determined to Succeed Enterprise education agenda

2. I simply failed to come up with the right words in the DFE’s search engine or

3. England, by putting the emphasis on personalised learning is mainstreaming some of the directions for the future learning I have discussed tonight rather than pigeon holing them under an enterprise education umbrella.

Which explanation is most plausible - this again something we can discuss in questions.

Let me stop there and invite questions.
I am delighted to be here this afternoon.

I want to start by admitting that I feel somewhat out of my depth already.

A personal view of Enterprise in Education before an audience of professional enterprise educators.

In terms of the practicalities of delivering enterprise in education I suspect everyone in this room knows more about it than I do.

So having admitted my own inexperience of the details of delivery - let me do what most politicians do in the circumstances - take refuge in the big picture.

However I want to try and avoid the fate of too many politicians when the deal in the big picture - by combining it with predictable platitudes.

In this respect I hope to be different I hope to combine the big picture - not with platitudes but with boldness.

Firstly, I am not seeking to be critical in any way of Peter Peacock, who has done an impressive job.

Secondly, I am not going to talk much about primary schools - who in general I think are doing an outstanding job.

My theme for this afternoon is that enterprise educators are the revolutionaries subversively promoting a new sort of education system in our schools; a subtle but subversive campaign to champion learning over teaching and personal development over accreditation.

But before I get to explore my theme of Enterprise educators as the revolutionaries - the Che Guevaras of Scottish education system.

Let me start by going back to the beginning with my own experience of enterprise education over a quarter of a century ago in a Scottish comprehensive - Park Mains in Erskine.

My plan for this afternoon is to use my own experience to suggest first that we have already come a long way, secondly to talk directly about the purpose of enterprise education and its revolutionary potential in our secondary schools.

Thirdly, I will look at the forces of conservatism ranged against you the revolutionaries, and finally to look at how the revolutionary impact of enterprise education can be maintained in the future.

But let me start with my first theme, the optimistic one, about how far we have come.

My Experience
Some time in early 1979, no doubt with the arguments over devolution dominating the public domain, as a 4th year pupil headed then for Medicine, I was one of a team of four who took part in a Sunday Times sponsored business competition where we formed the senior management team of a hypothetical company.

Needless to say, of the four of us, I am now a politician, one is a Cambridge anthropology don, the third is, I believe, a medical researcher and the fourth an Arts Administrator - not many entrepreneurs - but I suspect all of us would claim to be enterprising in our own fields.

But what struck me about that experience was quite how clueless I was about the world of business.

Quite simply I felt wholly out of my depth in any of the decisions we were called upon to make.

It is also fair to say that business competition was totally disconnected from my experience of formal careers advice. When it came to formal careers advice I recall a late November visit to Renfrew Town Hall Careers Evening where I paraded around a range of Admissions Officers who no doubt would have preferred to be elsewhere.

I am told I showed an undue interest in joining the Diplomatic Corp, but I am sure there are civil servants who remain grateful to this day that I did not pursue that particular course of action.

But in late 78 early 79 contemplating a career in business (and particularly the risks associated with it) was absolutely not the done thing.

One’s aspirations were firmly fixed by parental and teacher expectations on the professions, and the security it brought.

And that was true across the board, irrespective of aspiration or talent.

The whole process had a bias to the career choices that were explicable to a school child and many, many careers in business do not lend themselves to the simplicities of train driver, nurse, teacher, shop keeper.

So choosing a career at 14 - any career if it is thought of as life long - may lead to bias against business - but I will come back to that

Let me finish on my personal exodus towards enterprise. In my case it was another 15 years following stints in medical school, a study of economics and history, industrial relations, work in the public and voluntary sectors, I finally went to Business school.

Probably little more equipped than I had been in 4th Year to understand the basics of business.

But I turned down public policy third degree in favour of an MBA because somewhere I suspected I had an, unschooled but real, entrepreneurial instinct.

I am sure many of you who teach in the field of enterprise education will know this feeling.

The instinct was there but it took study at Business school for me to acquire the range of ancillary technical skills.

But crucially my MBA did not in itself change much. Importantly, I suspect my MBA would have counted for nought unless I have moved directly into a major consultancy firm where I had the chance to practice (admittedly lubricated by a generous salary) the skills I had learned at business school. Indeed, it was then in my early thirties that I served my only apprenticeship, applying the skills I had learned at business school.

And if you then fast forward another five or six years to my time as an adviser to Donald Dewar and later as a Minister, we were keen that the first Scottish Administration should bring together Enterprise and Life Long Learning in a single ministry for the first time - we believed anywhere in the world.

It was to be a tangible signal that in the 21st Century we would compete, all of us, on brain not brawn.

So all Human capital and skills acquisition after the post compulsory stage should be linked to enterprise to put knowledge and ideas and lifelong learning at the top of the economic and productivity agenda.

But it was with some surprise that I discovered as Enterprise and Lifelong Learning Minister I was also responsible for enterprise education within schools under the ambit of the old Business Education Partnerships.

I have to admit I was not particularly keen to hold on to any direct responsibility for what happened in the classroom - as one labelled the ‘minister for everything” I felt I already had enough on my plate.

And in many ways I hold the same view today - because if enterprise education is not something the education ministry is comfortable with then we have a problem.

One more anecdote about my time in government.

I have already eluded to the fact that I had had a few careers or at least a few jobs before entering Parliament, and they embraced the public, private and voluntary sectors.

And that winding road all seemed very far from Renfrew Town Hall in 1978 and Maths, Physics and Chemistry ‘O’ Grades.

My own crooked career path certainly contributed to my own conviction about the desirability of establishing Careers Scotland.

As a well paid management consultant, I was lucky enough to benefit from extensive personal development opportunities, on the job skills training, psychometric testing, present skills and all the panoply of self awareness and self discovery that goes under guise of modern management.

It occurred to me more than once in my 30s that my subsequent Careers choices really diminished the significance of the subject choices I had made at 12 or 14, or even the degrees I ended up completing.

The paper qualifications although seemingly important at the time have proved immensely less important determinants of my career path than my progressive realisation of what my skill sets were and who I was.

My own personal experience did contribute to my convictions about the need for the establishment of Careers Scotland as a universal all age service.

Because If we are all going to have three careers and eight jobs, then a single interview at the end of 2nd year with a kindly woman with knowledge of UCAS forms probably cannot meet the challenges of today.

And so although Careers Scotland sometimes apparently feels the ‘poor relation’ within Scottish Enterprise, the much more fundamental insight is that we live in a world where human capital is ‘all’ and people will regularly change careers.

They will be more productive at careers for which they are motivated and have aptitude - and they need to have the opportunity to change to suit their life circumstances.

All of this requires at least a brokering of such services by government.

It would be appallingly inefficient for only the wealthy minority in the private sector were able to avail themselves of services to help them know themselves better, identify their skill set and achieve a change of direction.

Which brings me to my final personal anecdote.

Let me role forward 25 years to last Friday afternoon where Linda and I were at St Catherine’s Primary School in Gallowhill, participating in a Global Citizenship project involving team work, creativity, active listening, self awareness and presentation skills - all a taster for a social enterprise business which will subsequently be transferred to the local community.

All a million miles from the needlework I had known in Primary 7 on Friday afternoons.

And I say all this to demonstrate a keen awareness for how much I think has changed, but that said I want now to turn to my central theme that enterprise educators are, if not the revolutionaries of the Scottish Education system today, they are certainly its subversives.

Enterprise Educators as Revolutionaries

Why Enterprise Educators as revolutionaries?

Because I think enterprise education at its best invites you to see the whole school experience with different eyes.

In any of you have not yet seen the Motorcycle Diaries of the life of the young Che Guevara I commend it to you.

The whole movie is a metaphor for learning to see with different eyes, because I think enterprise education is subversive in getting to the very heart of what the personal learning experience should be about in the 21st Century.

I will later come back to those in the Curriculum Review Group shortly to report to Peter Peacock — not the revolutionaries but the mediators of the system who are trying find a peaceful solution to the curriculum challenge, or, more accurately, the future of the classroom experience.

Here I want to focus particularly on secondary education and the early years of secondary education where the challenges are greatest.

So why are enterprise educators the revolutionaries - well what do we know about the prevailing environment.

* We know is that secondary school is not motivating too many young people,

* We know secondary schools are excessively academic for some and overly focussed on learning in a subject-centred way

* And thirdly we know there is insufficient focus on capabilities.

These are not just minor challenges; they go to the heart of the secondary learning experience and environment.

Secondary schools in Scotland still concentrate on the transfer of subject knowledge and the assumption those skills and capabilities will follow, i.e. critical thinking, creativity, etc. can be left to take care of themselves.

In fact there is little evidence that skills and capabilities can take care of themselves.

Enterprise education is revolutionary in the way it starts with skills and capabilities rather than subject knowledge.

So enterprise education throws down a fundamental challenge.

So what can the revolutionaries teach the rest of the system?

Looking to the future.

* Firstly, we need the school experience to be more, not less, intellectually demanding

* building skills and capabilities is not about dumbing down

* But we have an important problem of public perception.

* Secondly, assessment - we have to stop being seduced into measuring what is easy rather what is important.

* Too much assessment in Scotland is not a good proxy for what we are trying to achieve. The pre-eminent example is Standard Grades. Arguably the whole panoply of Standard Grades retained because people are nervous of change rather than because that qualification has a meaningful purpose these days.

* Thirdly, and this returns to the motivational issue — in the world in which human capital our brain not our brawn matters. School is no longer your only chance to learn. Lifelong Learning means all of us have the opportunity to learn later in life - indeed we have to be willing to do so in a world where India and China have 4 million graduates each year willing to earn 5% of the wages we are paid here.

* But this does require schools to be motivating - turn a child off learning for life and you have stymied their ‘life chances’ for life-in the past, this has been true of lots of Scots.

* Fourthly, a too narrow subject focus can get in the way of true learning. The reductionist view of knowledge has always been about ever greater specialisation. It has served us well in the past in many ways — but has not served us well in encouraging systems thinking and creativity

* So subject learning cannot be the ‘be all and end all’ and mercifully it isn’t in enterprise education. Enterprise education is about multi disciplinary transformational learning, of which you need more rather than less.

* Fifthly, we need more personalised learning. We have talked about it for twenty years but we still have to make it a reality. Instead we have a political debate dominated by class sizes. It can be an old-fashioned and outdated debate compared to the pressing development of fully personalised learning where young people become active learners, where learning is a co-production rather than a transfer of knowledge from one mind to another.

On all of these, five dimensions

* skills and capabilities,
* rethinking assessment,
* motivating an individual for life long learning,
* encouraging more multi disciplinary learning and
* encouraging personalised learning

On all of these dimensions enterprise education prefigures some of the changes we need to see over the whole school curriculum.

Enterprise education has become the vital arena for those within the existing system willingness to elevate “the creation of an enquiring mind” to the centrepiece of the educational experience.

As I tried to highlight with my own experience, the “passport to life” is not necessarily certification, but motivation, discipline, self-belief.

But I can almost hear the howls of protest from teachers that politicians are part of the problem — and I think the answer to that is “Yes we are”.

Too many politicians and parents start where I started this evening with anecdotes based on their own experience - and our experience wasn’t about, at least not conscientiously, being active learners or seeking to develop an enquiring mind, it was about something altogether more narrow.

And so when some of the more ambitious ideas are talked about this evening and which are being currently explored by the Curriculum Review Group, shortly to report to Peter Peacock, were discussed at the Parliament’s Education committee the questions that followed were mostly about subjects e.g. why aren’t we teaching languages, why aren’t children taking enough sciences, what is the future of Gaelic with few seeing the paradox of their own obsession with the traditionalism of the overwhelmingly subject based approach.

And this brings me to my third point, why has progress by the revolutionaries within the system been so slow?

Because I think it is only from understanding the barriers to change that we understand the full revolutionary potential of enterprise education and its place in the curriculum.

If you see enterprise education as prefiguring what should be the future classroom experience,

Success is not about how many entrepreneurs you create but it is about the power of demonstration to colleagues, to parents, to pupils of the power of a different type of learning experience.

Have politicians got in the way of this?

Absolutely.

We have, both under the Tories and under Labour, put accountability before creativity
And too often we have failed to engage the profession

But before we all beat ourselves up for that or blame HMI, I think it’s important to understand why accountability rather than creativity and curriculum inflexibility rather than curriculum flexibility have proved so durable in recent years?

In part it is because the generation of people who came into the profession in the 1960’s committed to using the transforming powers of education to change children’s life chances and in the new comprehensives in the 1970’s, like Park Mains, the school I went to, where there was little guidance for the non certificate pupils. In the knowledge economy, the aspirations of all pupils have to matter.

So it became a touchstone that flexibility in the past too often meant neglect.

But past explanations should not become contemporary excuses.

Scottish Education that aspires to be the best cannot be the best based on simply good enterprise education if it’s boxed into the residual space in the crowded school timetable.

Enterprise in education if it is to have meaningful long-term impact needs to be about a prefiguring of much more radical change.

But meanwhile enterprise education makes a powerful statement about the school of the future.

Enterprise education creates an environment, which simulates the corporate, or workplace environment and increasingly the schools of the future should be more like modern work places.

A place that brokers learning services provided by itself and others, rather than, as in the past, an imitator of the training grounds for professions, with all the standardised transfer knowledge that that implies.

It is not enough to focus on active learners-too much of the model is about ideas poured into an “empty” vessel.

So what are the forces of conservatism?

The sources of resistance to change?

Why is it so hard to achieve what so many of us want to see in the school curriculum?

Here I want to share with you some of my experience on the Parliament’s Education Committee as we tried to get to grips with curriculum inflexibility in the secondary years.

Our exploration of the issues was, and is, highly instructive.

The publication a few years ago of the flexibility circular was a welcome sign after 20 years of heavy conformity.

The first permissive tone for almost 20 years — and yet tragically the main manifestation to date has been an acceleration of early accreditation not a rethinking of the role of assessment.

Earlier and earlier certification shifts the focus more and more onto accreditation and less and less onto the acquisition of soft skills which are increasingly the key to success in life.

So in the Education committee I was frankly puzzled by the significant numbers of people in and around the system who were committed to significant change.

People genuinely attracted by real change but held back by real impediments.

So what were those forces of conservatism?

For the Scottish Executive - it is, implicitly at least, the fault of schools who are too reluctant to use the flexibility that is given to them.

From learning in TeachingScotland it is the conservatism of the Directors in Education who are more comfortable with the standardised subject based approaches to teaching as opposed to learning of the past.

From the same Directors of Education we heard it is the fault of the Executive because it’s much vaunted commitment to curricular flexibility means little when it comes to leaving the qualification structure in the pattern of the school day, little changed.

From individual head teachers we heard they couldn’t afford to adopt curriculum flexibility because if a child moves school what happens if a child enters a school operating in the old model?

So the change needs to be led from the top.

From teachers we heard this enforced conservatism reflects the attitude of the Inspectorate who still assess us based accreditation as opposed to achievement

From politicians we heard it’s the fault of the press and parents who will see revolutionary change as simply an exercise dumbing down

And from almost everyone we heard it’s a fault of the universities who whatever their warm words still use traditional assessment as the gateway to further learning.

It is perhaps little wonder faced with such a blame culture the entrepreneurs within the system have decide to just do it and establish demonstration projects of that different educational experience and have simply labelled the whole exercise “enterprise education.”

It may come as a disappointment to Scotland’s entrepreneurs that you are not setting out to raise Scotland’s business birth rate or create a new generation of Andrew Carnegies but you are doing something altogether more valuable.

You are demonstrating to all the various powers that be how valuable, motivating and relevant the school learning environment can be.

I would be genuinely interested in the question time to hear from the members of the audience about the routes into overcoming these forces of conservatism and whether it be the Executive, or LearningTeachingScotland, or Directors of Education or the Inspectorate or parents or Universities.

So turning to my last and final point about how we now look to the future.

We do need to galvanise the forces of change.

If we do not, we risk slipping behind those nations and regions who have found ways to move beyond the old ways and think big picture.

Perhaps it does not matter that you cannot measure the improvement in self-esteem what matters is that is has happened.

Perhaps the key contribution of enterprise education at the moment is what it has to teach us about the issue of pupil motivation.

Learning is changing.

More attention is being given to individual learning needs and teaching increasingly geared to accommodating a variety of learning styles and situations.

This is right in a world where most of what we know about “how the brain learns” has been discovered since 1985 and of course most teachers graduated long before then.

Flexibility is increasing with the greater use of specialist resources, digital equipment and computers; home based study and greater flexibility and complexity in the management of learning.

Students are becoming more responsible for their own learning and education is expected to monitor and support individual learning programmes while at the same time ensuring motivation, ability and continuity.

And these changing imperatives about learning are linked to the economic imperatives of knowledge based economy.

Businesses require people with skills of inventiveness and the work force needs to be flexible and able to learn new skills.

In the economy, the move from productivity to creativity is encouraging a different view of the learning environment.

The demand for more flexibility, freelance and home working is also influencing the learning environments.

These new ways of working demand qualities of self motivation, independence, self reliance and adaptability as well as organisational, entrepreneurial, and practical skills to make the technology work and achieve the desired outcomes.

The evidence, as many here will know, increasingly suggests that children often learn best from each other - for example, increasingly British children can be taught French by French children by video conference or a Nobel Prize winner teach Physics by video conferencing.

But are revolutionary changes under way in how people learn an appreciation that we will never win by slogging it out with India.

Creativity over productivity represents the high ground. We need a greater awareness of technology not as an answer but as the creator of a rich interactive environment that will characterise our work and leisure spaces.

This was brilliantly captured for me by the following provocative illustration.

Imagine for a moment how 100 hundred years ago Glasgow’s best surgeon, if put down in today’s modern Western surgery unit - he or she would be able to do little more than to wipe the forehead of a patient and make tea.

But if you took one of Scotland’s best teachers of 100 years ago and set him or her down in a Hillhead High School classroom today, they could probably stand up and teach many of the lessons.

So I suggest the pace of change needs to quicken -

Certain imperatives are key

1. the need for early intervention , watering the seed in the earliest years

2. recognition and support for winning teachers.

The ability to teach is immeasurably more important than the metrics we use; since we all know a good teacher when we see one but when we can’t measure it.

So we opt for metrics of what we can measure but are probably much less relevant in terms of educational outcomes.

Let me make just one final self evident observation but which should not be neglected - Enterprise in Education sits alongside education for citizenship.

Creativity and team work are the corner stones of enterprise in education - it’s about building self confidence, self awareness, a can-do attitude and a capacity to learn.

All of these are much more important than being enamoured of making money.

It is vital that enterprise education develops a sense of collaboration, a sense of community and shared responsibility, all virtues that will carry one far in the commercial arena as elsewhere in life.

Of course there are others matters on which I have said little but we might to return to in questions.

Not least how one brings about equal life chances for the 1 in 50 children born to a drug abusing parent who may lack vital parenting skills, or the academic vocational divide, or the role of leadership in schools.

But let me conclude here by reflecting on what I have tried to do today

* Firstly, to acknowledge how far we have come in the quarter century since I was at school
* Secondly, that Enterprise educators are indeed the revolutionaries of Scottish Education today
* Thirdly, to look at the forces of conservatism, notably around the curriculum and the absence of curriculum flexibility that is ranged against those revolutionary forces
* Fourthly, to look at some of the challenges for those revolutionary enterprise educators who are reshaping the service in tomorrow’s image.

Let me end with a provocative question.

When I was preparing for this seminar I browsed extensively the website of the Department for Education, the DFEE in England.

Interestingly I could not find a single speech on Enterprise education amongst over a hundred by their ministers.

There are of course three explanations

1. Scotland is indeed far ahead, at least in terms of Ministerial awareness, of the Determined to Succeed Enterprise education agenda

2. I simply failed to come up with the right words in the DFE’s search engine or

3. England, by putting the emphasis on personalised learning is mainstreaming some of the directions for the future learning I have discussed tonight rather than pigeon holing them under an enterprise education umbrella.

Which explanation is most plausible - this again something we can discuss in questions.

Let me stop there and invite questions.