Focus: Enterprise education, enterprise attributes, whole school approach.

Enterprise education is learning directed towards developing in young people those skills, competencies, understandings, and attributes which equip them to be innovative, and to identify, create, initiate, and successfully manage personal, community, business, and work opportunities, including working for themselves. Australian Government Department of Education, Employment and Workplace Relations

Enterprise education provides important and unique opportunities and contexts for a planned and explicit approach to build social and emotional development. Learning through enterprise education provides important opportunities for young people to be active and engaged in their learning, and to experience responsibility for their actions and decisions.

Teaching and learning in enterprise education is based on the enterprise attributes: Using initiative and drive Being creative and innovative Being positive and flexible Making decisions and solving problems Planning and organising Communicating and negotiating Managing resources and people Working cooperatively Reviewing and assessing.

The focus of enterprise education in this Module is building broad personal, social and lifelong skills rather than business and entrepreneurial skills. This is achieved through authentic learning, student decision making, and community building. A planned whole-of-school approach ensures that students build the required attributes in a systematic and understood way.

Effective programs in enterprise education make a vital contribution to the achievement of the National Goals for Schooling.

This Module supports leaders to engage in a process of whole school curriculum change to develop enterprise attributes in students. 

This Module was supported in part by funding from the Australian Government Department of Education, Employment and Workplace Relations. The views expressed here are those of the authors and do not necessarily represent the views of the Department of Education, Employment and Workplace Relations.

Through a whole school approach, the attributes of enterprise learning are planned and taught in an appropriate sequence to meet the range of needs, abilities and aspirations of students, and to promote progression and continuity in their learning. By embedding enterprise education in key learning areas, enterprise education is effectively integrated, rather than perceived as an add-on.

Leading enterprise education is built on the following Process for Change: Sell the need  - using data Build a team Establish a vision Communicate Form an action plan Show progress Monitor and persist Make the change part of the culture Celebrate.

This Module includes a number of Activities that are intended for individual or group use. They are an essential part of the learning. These Activities are also collected together in the Module Workbook. They are all downloadable Word documents.

We recommend that you:

• download the Workbook now, and save it to your desktop so that you can work on it throughout the Module,
  

or

• download the individual Activities as you come across them and save them into a folder on your computer.

 The Module Workbook