Business Education Needs to be More Inspiring

An Offsted report published this month describes “too much” of secondary school business education as “uninspiring”

Offsted based their report on the inspection of 118 secondary schools between 2004 and 2007.    The report shows that there are widely different methods used for teaching economics and business studies, and that these achieved widely differing results.

Characteristics of the weaker lessons included too much talk by teachers, closed questions and the overdependence on worksheets.  An recurring theme throughout the report was that there was too much emphasis on the descriptive work, and not enough on evaluation and analysis.

The report also raises the issue that students are sometimes disappointed by the lack of pratical aspects to the courses, and specifically mention not enough, if any, time spent with local employers and businesses.

We, at Fantasy Couriers,  believe that Economics and Business studies has the potential to be one of the most engaging and interesting methods of teaching students.  Business studies courses and activities give students the opportunity to take skills that they have learnt from other subjects and to apply them in a practical environment.

For example, algebra and equations make for some pretty dry maths lessons. Students are frequently unable to properly grap the principles behind algebra because its a concept.

But if you take that concept, and drop into an environment that the student can understand and internalise, then suddenly principles stop being concepts and start becoming tools.

For example get students to apply the concepts of algebra to work out a cost price for a product, or a break even sales level.  How many units do you need to sell at what price….., is a much better springboard for discussion, involvement and understanding than “if a+b=c and d+e=f , then….”

 

Finance and Business is the most common post school application of maths and numeracy for most people, with the exception obviously of those who develop the skills further into higher education, and the sciences.    So why wait until children leave school for them to discover this, lets teach them to apply their knowledge, and how to use it everyday in a practical way.

Discussions here centre on the use of Maths, but this could be equally applied to many other cirriculumn areas.  For example Art & Design, there are a small percentage of people that are able to use their Art & Design skills to build careers in Art, Architecture, Fashion and the literay world.  But a far larger percentage will use their Art & Design skills in a busines environment.  Designing websites, advertising & marketing materials, business documentation, manuals etc.

We at Fantasy Couriers believe that we should not think of Business Studies as a subject on the curriculum, it is instead a vehicle which can take the theoretical learnings of other subjects and show how these subjects have a real practical and modern relevance to everyday society, and our economy and world as a whole.

Business is the thing that keeps the world turning, and the current economic crisis has demonstrated clearly to everyone that business in America affects household happiness in the UK, and it is vital that we teach our young people to understand this.

A full version of the Offsted report can be found here.

UK Staff are some of the most productive in the world

There are many employers who think that their employees spend too much time on facebook, texting their mates and drinking coffee, however, contradictory to these opinions the Global Productivity Report published this week shows that UK workers are more productive than most other countries around the world.

Nicholas Crafts, Professor of Economics at Warwick University, believes that around 85% of an employees working time should be productive, that is contributing to the goals or objectives of the company.  Now although the UK didn’t acheive that level, it did have an unproductive time percentage of 26%, and was only one of two countries to increase productivity during the last year.

The results of the study were as follows, for unproductive time as a percentage of the working week;

• Australia – 22.9%
• UK – 26%
• France – 37.4%
• USA – 38.8%
• Brazil – 39.8%
• Germany – 40.2%
• South Africa – 41.8%

Causes of Unproductivity are belived to include poor management operating systems, poor frontline supervisions, communication problems, and a lack of workforce and management skills.

What is interesting here is that the responsibility for majority of these causes is held with management rather than with the workforce.  Consultants accross the board agree that to improve productivity you need to improve management, and that managers need to spend more time getting out there supervising, and giving feedback, and less time in meeting and administration.  In many companies employees are promoted because they have good techinical skills, because they are good at their job.  This does not necessarily indicate that they would be good at managing, and therefore training needs to be given to all employees being promoted into management and leadership positions to teach them the importance of managing and supervising properly.

And this is worse in the UK as traditional management structures put in lots of layers of middle management and line managers.

The survey also showed that the UK workforce was rated as the most motivated in the world, so if this could be combined with proper people management skills then UK workforce would be a power to be reckoned with.

Thatcher v Brown

Black Monday 2008 and the events thereafter, including the effective Nationalisation of 3 major banks today, brings the 1987 Black Monday back into forefront of everyone’s mind.

Undoubtedly Alistair Darling’s bleak phrophesies of the beginning of Septembers are fulfilling themselves, and we truly are facing some of the worse economic conditions of modern history.  And although Governments, Chancellors, Economists and Policy Makers are currently busy trying to head off the worsening conditions, attention will soon shortly turn to recovery, and how we can kick start the economy, and the financial systems back to life.

In the late 1980’s Nigel Lawson took some very controversial measures which many believe we are now paying the final price for.  These included a slashing of the top rate of income tax, and reduction of the interest rates (yes, you youngsters, the government used to be able to set interest rates itself) to encourage a spending boom.   These forcibly, perhaps unnaturally, low interest rates are credited with the creation of that monster the housing market boom.

And out of these circumstances was created Maggie’s most famous creation – the Yuppie!  Greed is good, filofaxes, shoulder pads, sharp suits and Macintosh’s.  The young Urban Professional, frequently found guzzling the Beaujolais, and saying “OK, Yah” loudly into their brand new brick sized mobile phone.

These yuppies helped to spend the UK out of the recession, and during 1988 and 1989 UK growth was at 5% pa, twice the long term average rate.

So, do we need the yuppies back?  Is there room for the Yuppie mentality which is based on greed and self, particularly in a world that is now concerned about the environment, long term energy solutions and is supposedly a more caring, sharing place than the UK of the late 1980s.

We also have a very different political thinking in place.  In the 1980’s and early 1990’s Thatcher and Lawson were busy telling us that the Free Market was the only way, and that state involvement and ownership only distorted markets and interfered with pricing.  But since then we’ve seen that British Rail wasn’t that bad after all, and that running fundamental organisations such as the Water Utilities and the Rail Transport Network with the sole motivation of profit, isn’t such a “win,win” situation for the rest of us.

The Labour government has a strong ethos of social responsibilty.  How they pursue it, and how successful they are at achieving it, is a matter for everybody’s own individual opinion.  However we cannot doubt that it is core to the policies and decisions made by them.

In the early 1990’s the Midland bank was one of the first UK banks (in modern history) to verge on bankruptcy.  But instead of stepping in and protecting the millions of ordinary people that had savings and mortgages, the Thatcher government left it to the markets, and HSBC picked up the midland bank for a song.  No more the listening bank.

The 1990’s also saw hundreds of small banks & building societies swallowed up under the label of “de-mutalisation”.  Perhaps now we can interpret that term slightly differently – taking the benefits away from the members and giving them away to the shareholders.

The crash of BCCI saw a lot of UK organisations loose a lot of money.  Not householders, but local councils, charities and larger companies.  The UK government did not act, but instead left it to the companies and the banking and market regulators to sort it out.  Laissez Faire – let it be – the free market catchphrase.

Contrast this with the current headlines we are reading this week;

• UK to sue Iceland
• Government takes stakes in 3 UK banks
• Gordon Brown leads way through financial crises
• even “Gordon Brown Superhero”

So who will be the winner?  Who has got it right?  Is it best for Governments to get involved aka Brown, or sit back in the Style of Thatcher and just let it all run its course.  Unfortunately there is no quick and easy answer to that, infact we may now, 20 years on, be finally assessing the impact of Maggie’s decision to Let it Be.

photo credits; Del boy – BBC images

Thatcher & Brown – Dailymail.com