Business and Education working in partnership
A speech for Arts Colleges – 12th April 2002
Let me start by thanking you for inviting me here
today to speak at your first conference for Arts Colleges. I’m really pleased (and not a little
apprehensive) to be here –for two
reasons.
Firstly, because of the issues we’re facing today.
·
I
want to begin by looking at four key revolutions of change we are all facing.
·
I
then want to examine how those revolutions are affecting the businesses that
will employ the young people with whom you work when they leave school.
·
Finally,
I want then to question how schools and employers might work in partnership to
tackle the effects of those revolutions
What I’m going to say will often be anecdotal and I don’t pretend to have any marvellous answers – other than BGOs – blinding glimpses of the obvious. But I hope the issues I’m going to explore will excite some interest.
And that brings me to the second reason for my
delight at being here. I am a former headteacher – a primary one. I know two things about groups of
headteachers. The first is that within
them they now hold the keys to change and regeneration in their own communities
– in the same way that the Church did over a century ago. The second is that, as a group,
headteachers make the most challenging and demanding audience any speaker is
likely to face. (or so said Barbara
Castle in her autobiography.) So I’m
excited to be speaking to you – but I do feel a bit like someone who’s just
about to be fed to the lions.
Let me set a context for what I’m going to talk
about with a quick introduction to my own organisation. Twenty years ago, almost to the month, if
you’d been a visitor to Toxteth or Brixton, or St Pauls in Bristol, you would
have encountered communities in turmoil.
You would have found mistrust of local services, a growing frustration
with the way in which those with money had turned their back on those living
within those communities, a seething rage, often racially polarised. This mistrust, frustration and rage finally
boiled over into the riots that took hold of a number of inner city areas of
our country. You will remember the
news pictures of street fights, looting, burnt out cars and CS gas.
What you may not remember is the fact that, in all
three communities, amongst the destruction and anger, one particular chain of
stores remained unscathed. And that
was Marks and Spencers. No-one broke
their windows, despite the fact that they had a strong presence in each of the
riot torn areas. People, business
people particularly, asked why – and it became apparent from interviews with
local community leaders, that people had left M&S alone because it was
trusted within the communities it served.
It supported where others ignored.
And from this discovery, Business in the Community
was born. Chief Executives of other companies,
stunned by what they saw on visits to the communities that had been torn apart
by the riots, felt that ‘something should be done’ and that they should follow
M&S’s example. From that
inauspicious beginning, BITC has grown to become a unique organisation of over
750 companies in the UK (the largest of its sort in the world) committed to
doing business in a better way – by working to improve environmental
performance, developing truly diverse employment policy, trading ethically and,
still, by putting time, talent and a percentage of profit, back into the
community. We continue to believe that
a healthy back street makes a healthy high street.
So on to the exploration ;
There is an old Chinese
saying that “forecasting is difficult – especially about the future!”
One thing we can say
without any difficulty is that we are already living in a time of profound
change – and the speed and extent of this change is going to intensify.
Just reflect that only 12
years ago, the Berlin Wall was still place; Communist regimes ruled in Eastern
and Central Europe; and the apartheid regime in South Africa still held Nelson
Mandela in jail.
12 years, the time it’ll
take a child who joined the Reception class in September, to work through the
school system to reach current statutory school leaving age.
·
A year’s worth of growth in the US economy in 1830
happens in a single day today.
·
All of world trade in the whole of 1949 happens in a
single day today.
·
The equivalent of all the science done in 1960
happens in one day today.
·
All of the foreign exchange dealings around the
world in 1979 happens in a day today.
·
All the telephone calls made around the world in
1984 happens in one day today.
·
The equivalent of all the e-mails sent around the
world in 1989 happens in one day now.
That is the reality of the
speed and extent of change through which we are all now living.
I believe we’re living through 4 revolutions of
change – and that these will have a major effect on our education and business
systems.
The most dramatic changes are coming from the growth
in the power of computing and telecommunications.
Our ability to access and transmit information is increasing dramatically
with the phenomenal increase in computing power and telecommunications capacity
and reduction in cost.
·
Computer power
is 8000 times cheaper than it was 30 years ago.
· If there was a similar rate of progress in the automobile industry, today you would buy a Jaguar car for $2, it would travel at the speed of sound and travel 1000 miles on a thimble of fuel
This transforms work: what work is done, where it is done, when it is done and by whom:
·
As many people now work in the IT industry in
Barbados as work in growing sugar there.
And what we know is that higher levels of skills – regularly renewed
throughout one’s life – will be essential for finding and keeping a good job.
The technology revolution is driving and is driven by the second
revolution: of markets.
Since the collapse of Communism and the fall of the Berlin Wall, there
has been a rapid process of liberalisation, privatisation and globalisation.
Three billion new consumers have entered the world economy in the past
decade.
We now have powerful transnational companies with global brands.
From Cape Town to Buenos Aires; from Sydney to New York; from Los Angeles
to Moscow: you will find the same global brands – especially in popular music;
in fashion; in fast-food.
Think of the Nike swish and “Just do it” – the golden arches of
McDonalds; the ubiquitous Levis.
Some see this as the CNN world – that we have been coca-colonised!
The youth culture is global – and the Internet and other new global media
will intensify this.
I was in Uganda just a couple of months ago. When I was travelling around
the South East, it was fascinating to watch the teenage taxi driver who was
ferrying me around, appear each morning, wearing a different, designer-label
T-shirt and listening to the same pop music that was playing in London.
But less than half an hour’s drive from the capital city: Kampala – there
were villages which did not seem to have changed in a thousand years.
Some suggest there is a conflict here: global cosmopolitans or locals. I
think the two can co-incide, and our business and education systems can help
them to do so:
After 3.85 billion years of evolution, world population had risen to 2.5
billion by 1950 and has doubled over the last 50 years to 5.9 billion, and is
set to double over the next 50 years to 9.5 billion. Source: Business in the Environment.
85 million more people are added to the world’s population every single
year. Around November 10th
this year, somewhere on this planet, a baby will be born who will tip the
world’s population over six billion.
The other key feature of this revolution of demographics is that we are
getting older!
We’ve got to think more carefully about how we can use the skills of
everyone.
The fourth revolution I want to highlight is that of Values.
Across the world, there is the phenomenon of the decline of deference to
the established sources of authority – intensified by the wider availability of
information and knowledge which means that “experts” are no longer so much in
control.
This has had an enormous effect on the way that young people view
adults. In business, We are
becoming more aware of and open to our different stakeholders.
Tom Delfgaauw at Shell describes this
changing attitude as: from:
“Trust me -- Tell me -- Show me” (and query increasingly: --
Include me)
Organisations in all three
sectors are being moved along from top to bottom
ignore -- listen -- listen+ act -- involve --include
Obviously the pace of change in society that I’ve
already spoken about affects business as much as it affects young people. We see that in the way companies fall in
and out of the FTSE much more often than ever before.
But change isn’t the only pressure on business.
I asked one Chief Exec recently what kept him awake
at night.
He reeled off the following list:
“diminishing role of government
regulatory pressures – you can tell he worked in the
telecom industry!
Media scrutiny
Society’s expectations of his company
The need to attract and retain the best staff
Returns on investment
The transparency that is now required about product
information
Adherence to standards
The pressures of globalisation
Corporate governance”
… and I thought the pressures of the Key Stage 2
SATS had been bad enough when I was a headteacher!
Last year, The Financial Times and PriceWaterhouse
Coopers asked the same question to 750 Chief Execs listed in their ‘Most
respected Companies’ survey.
One can begin to see why companies are getting more
and more interested in education and what our education system turns out. Why peddling products to young people
seems rather less important than ensuring that young people are properly
prepared for adult life.
In 1999, in fact, the McInsey War on Talent research
showed that only 3% of companies believed they were recruiting enough talent to
reach their business objectives in 5 years time.
And as for acting responsibly, last year’s Choosy
Grads survey suggested that, all things being equal, today’s graduates choose
socially responsible companies to go and work for.
If one then adds some other issues to the melting
pot,
The argument for
business getting a stake in the education system becomes all the more
strong.
And that, as MORI have shown, if you’re going to
recruit the right people, you’d better act in a responsible way.
So, Business wants to get a stake in education, but
why should schools bother to interact with business? I don’t believe the answer is about money. Schools and businesses are parts of local
communities – those communities will develop more effectively if the
constituent parts of them work collaboratively.
The big question for me is about the appropriateness
of different roles. And I think we
have a long way to go before we get this right. Look at the development over the past few years of the
governance of schools. In my view the
rationale for altering the make up of governing bodies to include more
community representation (including business) was a good one. But no-one gave really effective thought to
the time that people would have to give, the skills and expertise of the
Headteacher and their staff, the scale of the challenge on finding so many
effective people who could understand the difference between strategic thinking
and operational meddling. So we’ve
struggled in finding a way for business and the rest of the community to get
properly involved in governance – and we continue to struggle.
Similarly, and this brings me back to the very
beginning of this exploration, business has, in the past, tried to impose
itself on schools (through the curriculum or sponsorship with ties attached)
without properly engaging in a discussion with headteachers and the educational
establishment about what’s appropriate and what’s not. This has led to mistrust – on both sides –
and, in my view, in many places a potential for good in raising standards of
achievement, going unrealised.
Schools haven’t understood business’s motivations
for getting engaged with them.
Business hasn’t recognised educationalists’ aspirations for their young
people.
If only the two could understand each other, so much
more could happen.
The challenge for business has been to explore just
what acting responsibly really means.
We describe it as corporate social responsibility, the way in which a
company’s business behaviour affects its marketplace, the environment, the
workplace and the community.
And, as getting involved in the education agenda is
concerned, we see the areas of workplace and community as being particularly
important.
And what’s interesting to see is that, whilst
education is not the only way that a company can demonstrate its corporate
social responsibility, it is certainly the most popular amongst employees
Last year, the DTI carried out some research with us
to find out from companies just what benefits they felt they accrued from
education business links. The results
of the survey tell us an extraordinary story –
As one human resource director commented to me as
part of the research, “If you had said to me last year that you could offer me
a training opportunity for staff that provided them with hands on experience of
leading teams, improving communication skills, planning and organising,
managing change, to name just a few, then I would have bitten your hand off in
trying to get hold of it.”
The six big benefits to business are:
Just as we want young people to come out of school
prepared for a life of uncertainty, so business needs to develop its current
staff in the same way.
In fact…
Here is a list of competencies that our research has
shown can be developed through staff getting involved in running a project with
their local school.
I guess these are really BGO’s, but the trick is for
us to sell the opportunity to companies.
This is the second benefit. A small bakery in the North East decided
that it would get involved with its local school. As part of a Key Stage 3 project in design technology, the head
of department and the MD of the company gave the students a project which was
to design a new savoury product. The
young people got very excited, knowing that what they were designing would
really be for sale in their local shops.
They came up with a savoury line which is still in the bakery’s top
twenty sellers, out of 1400 products.
They sell 6000 a week.
Successful busineses get ahead, and then stay ahead,
through innovation. Innovation in the markets
they create and the processes, products and services they provide to the
market. Our research has found that
partnerships with education are a powerful way of developing the competences
needed by the firms of tomorrow, including innovation, creativity and personal
initiative.
Just by getting involved in education shows that a
company has a learning culture.
Employees report a stronger affection for the company, a growth in
enthusiasm and a greater wish to work co-operatively with colleagues.
The ability to recruit and retain quality staff
comes from the image the company projects and the actions it takes. Providing quality work experiences for
young people can lead to easier recruitment later on. Up in Grimsby, one employer told me, ‘It’s nice to see their
faces when they come in. They think
they are going to see a nasty, slimy fish factory. But when they see our state of the art technology it opens their
eyes. They think about us
differently. We have gained some
seriously good apprentices as a result of this.”
I mentioned peddling product, but gaining and retaining
customers tends to be more subtle than this.
WHSmith
Companies that work with schools report a gain in
standing within the community, often at little or no cost to themselves.
Boots
This sort of enlightened self interest is a long way
away from the hard nosed unacceptable face of capitalism which many assume
United Kingdom plc to portray.
But despite everything, comparatively few companies,
particularly small ones, get heavily involved in supporting their local
schools.
Much of this is down to a natural reticence from companies who don’t want to be seen to
be ‘interfering’ in education
But if companies and schools recognise the genuine
benefits that can be accrued through partnership, that supporting education
doesn’t mean peddling products but is more about ensuring the creation of the
healthy backstreets that lead to healthy high streets, then the movement to
support schools will grow.
So we have created a simple agenda for business
involvement in education… an agenda where, if companies and schools are both
open about the benefits they can accrue, and plan together to generate them,
real progress can be made. The agenda
has been built following discussions with teacher unions, headteachers and
students – as well as business leaders and HR directors
It’s a simple offer:
Volunteering
Raising pupil achievement
Employee motivation
Primary and transition
Work experience
1:1 mentoring
integrated curriculum for vocational training
enterprise
School Governance
Partners in Leadership
Last year we asked our member companies what they
would be likely to concentrate on in the next few years. Here’s the ranking order, compared with a
similar survey we did with the Centre for Education and Industry five years
before.
You’ll see that employee volunteering in all its
guises is very high
Sponsorship of schools came 20th – the
bottom of the list.
So if there’s something to learn from all of this
it’s this.
Young people deserve to be properly prepared for the
unpredictable
Companies want to support schools in doing this, for
reasons that are far from the most crass
There is a commitment from United Kingdom plc to
support you in your work with local communities, particularly the most
vulnerable ones, but that commitment is about investment of time and talent,
not cash
Being transparent about one’s objectives leads to
success.
And we can’t afford not to work in partnership,
because today’s reception class child, experimenting with paint in the wet
area, deserves the chance to grow up to be the next generation’s leading visual
artist.
As Pablo Cassals wrote:
“We should say to each of
them: do you know what you are? You are
a marvel. You are unique. In all the world there is no other child
exactly like you. In the millions of
years that have passed, there has never been a child like you. And look at your body – what a wonder it
is. Your legs, your arms, your cunning
fingers, the way you move. You may
become a Shakespeare, a Michelangelo, A Beethoven. And when you grow up, can you then harm another who is, like
you, a marvel. You must cherish one
another. You must work – we must all
work – to make this world worthy of its children.”
Thank you.