Education for enterprise: the state and alternative employment for young people

The state, industry and the voluntary sector are all investing resources in encouraging the development of the ‘enterprise culture’ among the young unemployed. Such measures can be interpreted as an attempt to sustain the work ethic while changing attitudes, aspirations and expectations towards employment. They constitute a major effort to change work cultures. The alternatives being advocated, such as self‐employment, small businesses, co‐operatives and community businesses have starkly opposing ideologies behind them.

So far there has been no systematic research on the development of alternative forms of work by young people, not even at the level of charting the extent and form in which they are emerging. This paper seeks to make a start by exploring the rhetoric behind the ‘education for enterprise’ movement and the patterns of support and advice on offer. It then discusses the implications of the fostering of the ‘enterprise culture’ for our analyses of state intervention in youth unemployment and the early labour market experiences of young people.     

Whither the Enterprise Culture: An Examination of Young People's Job Values

Abstract

The proceeding decade has seen much official effort expended on encouraging the growth of an ‘enterprise culture’. The present report considers the extent to which enterprise has come to be valued by young people today. Data on work values from the ESRC's 16‐19 Initiative indicate that enterprise values are largely rejected in favour of the traditional attractions of good pay and prospects. The entrepreneurial minority tend to be more committed than others to a meritocratic society, but holding entrepreneurial values is unconnected with political affiliation. Attempts to encourage an entrepreneurial spirit appears to have failed to influence young people's notions of work.     

Filmmaking education and enterprise culture: an ethnographic exploration of two filmmaking education contexts and their relation to bedroom culture and the creative workplace

ABSTRACT

Filmmaking education has never been firmly integrated into schooling and in past years has suffered from cuts to funding for formal and non-formal arts education and youth work. It continues to exist only by drawing on creative industry and cultural consumption practices as well as state funding. In this paper, we explore the filmmaking education contexts we encountered while doing our own pieces of year-long ethnographic research. These contexts import ‘enterprising’ ways of thinking, doing and being from the creative workplace and ‘bedroom culture’. Located across life’s domains, they address enterprising subjects who take pleasure in work, make use of leisure and are always learning. We argue that these filmmaking education contexts support young people to develop their private creative practice and introduce them to the possibility of work in the creative industries but, because of the enterprise culture in which they are entangled, uncritically address these young people as enterprising subjects.     

The mainstreaming of charities into schools

Abstract

This paper focuses on the ‘mainstreaming’ of charities into schools. There have been growing concerns about the permeation of business and business values in education, but relatively little attention has been paid to the ways in which schools are increasingly engaged in the ‘business’ of fundraising for charities. Drawing on survey data from the WISERDEducation Multi-Cohort Study (WMCS), the paper outlines young people’s relationship with charities. The data show that young people have a high degree of engagement with charities, in which schools play a significant part. There are likely to be many positive aspects to this engagement, inasmuch as it fosters and reflects young people’s sense of collective responsibility. However, there are also issues about the extent to which this high level of involvement marginalises other approaches to promote the social good and increases the permeation of business values and business into school. The paper concludes that the current mainstreaming of charities into schools is not necessarily a self-evident ‘good’ and that this under-researched phenomenon deserves greater critical attention within and outwith schools.     

Reconstructing the Work‐based Route: lessons from the Modern Apprenticeship

Abstract

Since the late 1970s, the work‐based route in post‐compulsory education and training has been struggling to create a respectable image through being seen as almost totally synonymous with discredited government‐sponsored youth training schemes. Yet, for many young people, who have no desire to remain in full‐time education after the age of 16, the work‐based route offers an attractive means of acquiring further education and qualifications. The introduction of Modern Apprenticeship, with its professed aim of raising the standard of the work‐based route, provides the opportunity to re‐examine how such a route could be reconstructed a decade after the launch of the YouthTraining Scheme (YTS). This paper draws on current research into young people's experiences of the pilot year of Modern Apprenticeship covering 14 occupational sectors. Interviews with ‘apprentices’ will be presented to highlight the ways in which young people conceptualise such issues as the form and structure of their future working lives, the realities of their local labour markets, the disadvantages of full‐time education (including higher education), the liberating potential of workplace learning, and the term ‘apprentice’.     

Servicing Small Communities by the Use of Technology,and Opening the Internet

Abstract

This article describes the way the Internet has been introduced to a small community in South Australia, by means of a business system originally provided for the Council's use. Internet, while heard about, had never been used to any great extent, and is a good example of introducing the ‘young’ of our subject to this facility ‐‐ those young being council workers and the general public.     

Youth lifestyles,employment and the labour market: concepts in need of clarification

Abstract

This paper attempts to throw some light on issues which are currently of major concern both to governments and individuals. Specifically it focuses on the transition process from school to work and unemployment. A selective review of recent major researches in this area indicates the complex interplay between life circumstances, employment and unemployment as they influence the ‘career’ development of young people. The notions of lifestyle, employment and labour markets are examined for their conceptual usefulness and are found to be wanting.

The paper begins with a definitional note on lifestyles and this is followed by a review of two recent qualitative and quantitative studies which have focussed on the employment‐related circumstances of young people. Such studies are utilised to clarify some of the processes which may be subsumed under the heading of occupational socialisation and, hence, point up the ambiguities in such received notions as employment, unemployment and the labour market.

By way of conclusion a preliminary analysis of data reflecting the perceptions of school leavers provides further conceptual clarification of the concepts in question by identifying six components of ‘lifestyle’ labelled, moral cynicism, work ethic, independent action, occupational passivity, financial management and survival optimism.     

Enterprise Education: a new social ethic for higher education? [1]

ABSTRACT

Higher education institutions were invited in 1988 to bid for substantial grants to encourage the development of curricula that would produce the ‘enterprise graduate’. This paper discusses the Enterprise in Higher Education Initiative with reference to six case studies of courses with very close links with their respective employment sectors. The paper tentatively suggests the following conclusions: (a) that meeting Industry's demands can lead to the opposite of enterprise education, i.e. conservative credentialism; (b) that the lack of a satisfactory national policy on training and the attempt to ‘push down’ training to courses has an ‘opportunity cost’ which could lead to less enterprising graduates; (c) that enterprise education should be concerned with the needs (in a broad and general way) as opposed to the demands of industry.

     

Friendships for wellbeing?: parents’ and practitioners’ positioning of young children’s friendships in the evaluation of wellbeing factors

ABSTRACT

Friendship matters for young children’s development, learning and experience of wellbeing. This paper emphasises the significance of young children’s friendships for their wellbeing, especially in the context of early years settings. Findings are presented from two online questionnaires developed for the project, in which 155 parents/carers and 285 practitioners in England expressed their perceptions of what matters for young children’s wellbeing. Data shows some ambivalence in the views of both parents/carers and practitioners about the importance of friendship in this context. Both groups gave low prioritisation to ‘the company of friends’ for children’s wellbeing. As friendships are of central importance to young children themselves, this could suggests that adults and children may have different priorities, which raises questions about the extent to which young children’s friendships are seen as important by adults. The paper concludes by proposing the need for practitioners in particular, but also parents, to consider their roles and priorities for children’s lives within schools and nurseries, including how they might sensitively support and facilitate children’s friendships in play, activities, transition and everyday life.     

You Can Ask Me If You Really Want to Know What I Think

Abstract

Recent social policy discourses in Aotearoa New Zealand focus on vulnerable children’s well-being and the detrimental, long-term and costly impacts of child poverty. The discourse pervading much of the policy labels children and young people as ‘vulnerable’ or ‘at risk’ or ‘in crisis’, a view, which we argue, is both disempowering and marginalising. We propose a shift in focus which views children and young people as agentic, capable and competent. Drawing on several small-scale research projects and reports we demonstrate how, when asked, children and young people can participate effectively in discussions about policy matters that concern them (Article 12, United Nations Convention on the Rights of the Child, 1989 [UNCROC]). We have much to learn from the insights children share with us when asked, but very often existing structures, at both government and community level, do not include adequate processes to hear their voices, let alone act on what has been communicated.     

How flexible gender identities give young women advantages in China’s new economy

ABSTRACT

In this article, we examine how a cohort of urban youth born under China’s one-child policy have developed flexible gender identities through their childrearing aspirations and educational and occupational narratives, choices, and trajectories between 1999 and 2014. Drawing on surveys of 406 respondents conducted in 1999, 2012–2013, and 2013–2014, and interviews of 48 of those respondents in 2011–2014, we argue that our female research participants were more able to produce flexible gender identities than their male counterparts, and that China’s new market economy increasingly rewards youth who are flexible enough to adjust to rapidly changing circumstances, an approach more compatible with the flexible gender identities produced by young women than the more rigid gender identities produced by young men.     

EATE and the Education of Primary School Teachers: problems and solutions seen from the perspective of a centre for primary teacher education

Abstract

The need for enterprise awareness is acknowledged: however, analysis of ‘enterprise’ reveals an ambiguity between enterprise as a personal quality, and enterprise as the activity of the entrepreneur. This creates conflict for those engaged in the education of primary school teachers. It is argued that both concepts of enterprise have something of value to offer Primary Education, and that both are concerned with the practical achievements of the educator. A model for implementation of the EATE initiative is proposed which resolves a conflict between the ideal and the instrumental in Primary Education. This provides a synthesis which allows for a productive partnership between EATE and institutions concerned with the education of primary school teachers.     

Teachers’ Evaluation of Enterprise Education in the Secondary School

Abstract

This investigation was undertaken as part of research into ‘mini‐enterprise'activity in the secondary school. The research aimed to evaluate ‘mini‐enterprise’ as an approach to learning and to offer different examples in practice. Fundamental to this evaluation was an examination of the views and attitudes of teachers towards ‘mini‐enterprise’ work. This paper describes the survey undertaken to determine teachers’ attitudes towards certain key ‘enterprise’ issues and offers a summary of the research findings concluding in a discussion of the wider educational implications.     

Merleau-Ponty’s ‘wild Being’: Tangling with the entanglements of research with the very young

Abstract

This article draws on a study of infant participation in research, and work in philosophical-empirical inquiry, to illuminate some of the inexhaustible entanglements constituting the collective relational landscape of educational research of particular encounters, which have been called moments of wonder. Working with Merleau-Ponty’s philosophical notions of wild Being and flesh, I look closely at one such ‘moment’, as lived as an entanglement of embodied self, worldly things, and other selves that collectively comes into being whilst opening onto time and space. I see this account as demonstrating the value of learning to see the ‘collective’, wherein individualities are engendered, for developing new understandings of early childhood education (ECE) relational landscapes, specifically in relation to ‘participatory’ research with very young children – and educational research more generally.     

‘Korea … it's not really actually an Asian country’: Australian children's experiences of an intercultural school partnership programme

ABSTRACT

In Australia, intercultural understanding has been prioritised in education and curriculum documents at both federal and state levels. Alongside this educational priority, schools have also been encouraged to demonstrate ‘engagement’ with ‘Asia’, such as through a partnership with another school in the Asia-Pacific region. My research findings are based on an ethnographic study of Year 5 and 6 Australian children's experiences of an intercultural school partnership initiative through on-line classroom exchanges over a two-year period. Through a critical analysis of ‘complexity reduction’ I draw attention to the processes through which children made sense of perceived racial and cultural differences as part of their involvement in partnership activities and conclude with some reflections on the extent to which educational initiatives such as intercultural school partnership programmes that aim to foster intercultural understanding can do so without reinforcing unequal intercultural relations and stereotypes.     

Practices and policies in child labour: lessons from Malta

Abstract

The problem of child labour is widespread in Malta, despite the fact that there is compulsory schooling up to the age of 16, and even although most of the necessary formal legislative measures to combat the employment of children have been taken. Data is presented in order to provide a clear picture of the extent of the problem, as well as of the general conditions which prevail in the ‘twilight economy’ in which child workers labour. Economic and socio‐cultural reasons which could explain the continuing practice of child labour in Malta are explored, and general policy recommendations made.     

‘Culturespeak’ is everywhere: an analysis of culturalist narratives in approaches to sexuality education in Mozambique

ABSTRACT

Building on postcolonial feminist scholars and critical anthropological work, this paper analyses the frequent deployment of the notion of ‘culture’ by decision-makers, educators, international agency staff and young people in the design, delivery and uptake of sexuality and HIV prevention education in Mozambique. The paper presents qualitative data gathered in Maputo, Mozambique to highlight the essentialising nature of culturalist assumptions underpinning in-school sexuality education. I argue that conceptions of ‘traditional’ and ‘modern’ culture are deployed to explain the epidemic, both of which spectacularise and decontextualise phenomena and practices, and perpetuate the western trope of the Third World Woman. The paper concludes by arguing that a singular emphasis on ‘culture’ – in its various guises – diverts attention from structural causes of young Mozambican women and men’s vulnerability to HIV and AIDS, and crucially, rather than problematise gender relationships, reifies and solidifies these. Thus, while sexuality and HIV prevention education cannot be understood or delivered independently of the cultural context in which it is situated, a more nuanced conception of culture is required – that is, one that is attentive to questions of power and specifically, who is in a position to make meanings ‘stick’.     

NAPCE Newsletter

It is Jeremy Henzell-Thomas's conviction that the contemporary preoccupation with the so-called ‘clash of civilizations’ is as ill-founded as it is unhelpful. The assumption of an adversarial stance to which it leads is fuelled by, and affirms, a polarized thinking which does disservice to fundamental truths about unity and diversity. Drawing on theology and philosophy, he examines the etymology of key words –‘identity’, ‘authenticity’, ‘originality’, ‘fitra’ (nature) – to argue for the need to transcend difference in order to achieve (universal) identity. ‘We share a common identity as human beings, and, beyond that, a common origin within the source of Creation.’ If we are to honour the spiritual needs of young people and provide an education which is genuinely holistic, we need teachers who are prepared to listen to what young people are saying and to enter into a relationship with them that goes beyond the personal, the social and the moral.     

Evaluating local labour market policy: the case of TECs

Abstract

The 1988 Government White Paper ’Employment for the 1990s’ proposed the establishment of Training and Enterprise Councils (TECs) throughout England and Wales, to promote and support small businesses and self‐employment, and to plan and deliver training in their local areas. Placing the responsibility for the formulation and delivery of training almost entirely in the hands of local private sector employers, the TEC initiative has proved to be a highly controversial and contested area of policy. Accordingly, it has attracted a sizeable multi‐disciplinary academic literature which variously portray it as either innovative and revolutionary, or a retrograde high‐risk strategy. This paper commences by placing TECs in the long‐term historical context of previous national and local training measures in England and Wales, which is surely essential to any assessment of the extent to which they mark a novel and relevant modem response to contemporary training and labour force requirements, or a mere re‐working of obsolete government policies and responses to high unemployment levels. This is followed by a brief discussion of the emergence, and state encouragement, of an ‘enterprise culture’ in the 1980s. Against this background, the final section of the paper outlines the establishment of TECs, providing examples of their operation, and reviews the body of literature regarding their potential and actual strengths and weaknesses. It is argued that the historical contextualisation of TECs is fundamental to any evaluation of the extent to which they are an appropriate revolution in training and enterprise, or simply a newly packaged continuation of earlier, discredited, training policies and initiatives.