Estonian in Scotland

Pupils from schools across Scotland are gearing up to welcome 100 international delegates to Edinburgh for the start of a three day international conference on Monday (16 November) to showcase Scotland’s comprehensive approach and commitment to enterprise in education.

The conference will be hosted by school pupils and aims to demonstrate the importance to the Scottish economy of developing enterprising and entrepreneurial young people, as well as enabling the exchange of practice amongst international partners from the EU and beyond.

The delegates, who will be attending from as far afield as Estonia, Nigeria and the United States, will be presented with Saltire coasters designed and produced by Scotland’s Most Enterprising Special School. Carrongrange secondary school in Larbert, Falkirk, received the accolade at this year’s Scottish Education Awards in recognition of their enterprising approach to learning and teaching.

During the conference, delegates will hear from keynote speakers including the Cabinet Secretary for Education and Lifelong Learning, Fiona Hyslop and Lord Smith of Kelvin, Chair of The Weir Group and Scottish and Southern Energy and member of the First Minister’s Council of Economic Advisers. A number of workshops will be running over the three days which will include sessions on Scotland’s approach to enterprise in education through the Government’s Determined to Succeed strategy; the importance of partnerships between employers and schools; how working with employers is helping teachers to contextualise learning and make it more relevant to life beyond school; and how young people are being exposed to entrepreneurial learning and what affect it has on their future career choice.

Blog site of the conference

Enterprise in Sweden

Ingela Ernestam through her presentation gave an introduction to the education system in Sweden and how it was driven in the main by the government. The SELF project would allow them to develop enterprise further and engage with other countries that are on a similar pathway.

Enterprise in Finland

Virpi Utriaine from Finland gave an very comprehensive overview of enterprise in Finland and showed clearly the steps that it has been developing over the past 18 years to establish enterprise in schools. Virpi introduced to us the Mill of Entrepreneurship Education and how Finland was organising its enterprise which is mainly delivered by YES and JA-YE Finland.
An exciting part of her presentation was to highlighted a new self-evaluation tool , funded by EU, which was under development at Lappeenranta University of Technology. It will ready by 2011 and it will be interesting to see how it can be used.

Enterprising SELF Conference

The main reason for my visit across was to participate in the Enterprising SELF Seminar in Johvi in Estonian. The seminar had over 200 delegates from Estonia, Latvia, Sweden, Finland and Scotland sharing their aspirations for enterprise in their individual countries.

In a very short time period Estonia and in particular Ida Viru have embraced enterprise in education and are seeking to have it introduced into their schools. The Ministry from Education was in attendance to give the welcome and they informed the delegates that the new Education Plan for Estonia will have it is entrepreneurship for every child.

The opening speaker was Mariliis Randmer , a young confident Estonian who gave an insight into the region and pulled on punches with the delegates on giving her view of education in Estonia and why it had to change for the better.

Employer Engagement

This morning found me in Toila Gymnasium speaking to 23 teachers from across kindergarden, primary, secondary and community education in Ida Viru on the aspect of engaging with employers. The presentation is found on my slideshare site and gives first of all an overview of the changes in the Scottish education system and why these have occurred and then a short summary of the benefits to pupil, teacher, school and employer of engaging with the education of young children.

The OECD Report Learning in the 21st Century Research, Innovation and Policy gave me the opportunity of introducing the group to research in this field of " learning sciences" which suggests that the way we deliver education should change as we are now in the knowledge economy.

What are your thoughts - do we need to change our pedagogy ?

The group engaged with the Learning and Teaching Scotland website and in particular the Partnerships with Employers section of the Enterprise in Education site looking at some of the online support resources.Several videos clips were shown to the group of how schools in Scotland were engaging with employers from kindergarden to secondary.

In the afternoon we discussed how they were engaging with employers and a comprehensive list was produced to offer each other in group some new ideas. It appeared that employer engagement was being approached at different levels of participation. Each teacher was then challenged to look at producing a mind map of how they could build capacity in gaining more employer contacts (based on the Google Wonder Wheel idea) starting with themselves first then leading out into teaching colleagues, pupils,local community and national organisations.

Anybody have new ideas that could assist the group in engaging with employers ?

"The greatest journey begins with a single step" and that is what I challenged them to do - start on mapping out contacts first and then in January begin to create an idea / team / plan around employer engagement which would commence in August with their new teaching programme.

Have any teachers some case study they would share with these teachers?

Some link sites for assistance.

Slide Presentation - Employer Engagement
Shift Happens - how the world is changing and a signpost for change in education
Eric's Blog site
Employer engagement videos
Caledonian Produce (Marks & Spencer Supplier)
The Muir Project - pupuls working with builder to deliver a teaching house
Rapid Response Engineering Challenge - working across Scotland to increase an understanding of Civil Engineering.
Cathkin Nursery School working with a film company to help them produce their own movie and find out about the jobs in a film company.