NEWS: Hull College CPD day
Earlier this month we were asked to focus our enterprising sights onto a slightly older crowd than usual and
run an enterprise day for the staff of Hull College. We believe that everyone has enterprise skills and that
our job is really to help you become aware of those skills, give you opportunities to develop them and the
ambition and confidence to turn them into action; there is no reason that these opportunities should be for
the under 18s only, we were excited to get the staff engaged too.
If I can side-step into a little serious research for a moment, two of the drivers of enterprising behaviour are
peer-group attitude and social capital. We know that you are more likely to behave entrepreneurially if…
a) You know someone entrepreneurial
b) People you interact with are positive about enterprise (that includes friends, family and teachers)
c) You know people who know people – the more contacts the better!
(luckily your ability to spell entrepreneurially doesn’t affect your ability to do it; or we’d be in trouble)
So we were delighted to work with Hull College staff, we could help them to understand enterprise and
enterprise education better, we could spark the enterprise skills as well as give them the ability to be positive
role-models and enterprise champions for their students …we also gave them a giant cookie and hopefully
hefty dose of inspiration too!
The aim of the session was to increase their awareness of what enterprise is, what enterprise education is,
why they are so important and to get them to do something enterprising – no point listening to us talk if
you’re not going to do it yourselves.
Without giving the details away we covered football teams, self-awareness, climbing Everest, cross-dressing
and George Forman …in the first 30mins.
We aimed to give the staff an chance to evaluate their own skills, to understand the jargon attached
to ‘enterprise’ and ‘entrepreneurship’, to see case-studies of award winning enterprise education in action, to
understand some of the science behind enterprise behaviour and to see how we’ve turned squashing fruit into
a programme that increases employability skills and aspiration levels for students.
…..we also managed to teach a few staff members to tweet; it wasn’t on the original list of objectives but
we’re happy to throw a few extra staff development elements in to pep up the day – like a shot of wheatgrass
in smoothie!
We were seriously impressed by the way the Hull College team embraced the enterprise ideas and how truly
unrestrained some of their own enterprise ideas were for Hull College – if you hear a news report about a
100% eco-friendly college that floats on the Humber and is powered by the river, or a new plan to run a Hull
monorail to all corners of the city where glass domed college faculties trade student goods with the general
public then we’d be happy to take a little of the credit for sparking those ideas.
To sum up we love working with students, helping them to realise just how brilliant they already are and how
high they can fly, but we’re only in schools and colleges for a tiny amount of time in the big scheme of things.
If we can work with more staff on CPD days, inset days or staff development days we can have enterprising
teachers supporting enterprising students and really shift the culture across the UK.
It’s good to be ambitious!
Richard and the team.