Chapter One Background
Each of the 32 local authorities in Scotland can potentially nominate an individual to be a member of SCEIN. Historically, some council representatives have been more involved than others, but as the review of Education for Work and Enterprise progressed, more councils began to play a greater part in these meetings. This was largely due to a recognition that both funding and political will were likely to come together to drive what became known as the enterprise in education agenda forward. Many of those local authority advisers who had been involved in education/industry work over the years of the Technical and Vocational Education Initiative ( TVEI) and Education Business Partnerships ( EBPs) had been members of SCEIN since its inception and brought to the network their substantial experience and insight into the interface between education and work.
At the point in time when SCEIN members were surveyed for this research, those surveyed were a mixture of:
- long-standing members with wide experience of specialist roles in education/industry links;
- local authority advisers with a range of responsibilities for the curriculum or for educational support activities (a small number of those were also responsible for the implementation of permit legislation for the work of school pupils aged under 16, and therefore had also participated in this research as part of the earlier local authority study); and
- new appointments to lead the authority's response to Determined to Succeed, and funded from this tranche of money. These tended to be from smaller authorities and were very much in the minority of respondents. Several of these individuals had not previously had a role at authority level and were therefore more likely to respond from their knowledge of the situation at a school (usually secondary) level.
The potential of the SCEIN network to advise and inform developments in enterprise in education was also increasing at this point. While no single individual could know exactly what was happening in his/her area, no other group of people was better placed to feedback the impact of policy on practice (and vice-versa) in enterprise in education, and this could be seen in the extent to which those making and delivering policy consulted the network and attended its meetings, and have continued to do so since.
For similar reasons this was a group of individuals worth consulting about the extent to which school pupils' part-time employment related (or could relate) to their educational experiences. Their knowledge and understanding of the interface between education and work would be the most likely way of getting the best authority-level view of the inter-relationship of school pupils' part-time work and their education.