The Missing Piece: The Essential Skills that Education Forgot

Book excerpt: There is a fundamental gap in education. While we focus on building knowledge and securing good grades there is something missing. All of us, whatever we do, need a core set of skills which go beyond the academic - to work with others, to manage ourselves, to communicate effectively, and to creatively solve problems. We might call them different things but we draw on them as much as numeracy or literacy. Tom Ravenscroft knows them as the enterprise skills. If we need them, our students need them even more. They underpin effective learning in the classroom. They stop students dropping out at university. They are more highly valued than academic grades by employers. They are a foundation for successful entrepreneurship. They are the enablers of civic engagement and social mobility. When we look to the next decades, in a world of increased automation, fragmented jobs and the need for constant learning it is these skills that will really set our children and young people up for future success. Yet as an education system, we behave as if they cannot or should not be taught. But they can be, and they must be. Tom Ravenscroft has writen this book almost a decade after he set up Enabling Enterprise as a social enterprise. He was a secondary school teacher and the Enabling Enterprise programme was for the students in his inner-city classroom. They were not learning enough in school, and were in no sense set up for the rest of their lives. Over the last ten years, he has had the enormous privilege of leading a growing team of teachers and has worked with hundreds of classroom teachers, thousands of employer volunteers and over 200,000 students. He has seen these students build those skills with the same rigour and focus as any other academic learning. And he has seen that when they are mastered, we truly allow our students to achieve their potential.