Enabling Enterprise has been working with schools for almost eight years, to ensure young people leave education with the skills, experiences and aspirations they need to succeed.

This year, over 70,000 pupils will participate in our programmes, which are underpinned by support and training for school staff, and all developed by our team of teachers.

At some point or another, all of our pupils will be required to work together to solve problems, whether they are a Reception class figuring out who would be the most useful on the moon, or a Year 13 group collaborating on how to best to finance an initiative to tackle homelessness.

That's why “team work” and “problem solving” are two of the eight skills that underpin all the experiences students have on our programmes

As an organisation, we are working with over 100 employer partners and 255 schools to solve problems and answer key questions: how can we, on a systemic level, prepare our young people to meet the challenges of life and work in the ‘fourth industrial revolution’? How can we meet the changing needs of employers in the 21st century? How can we effectively reflect these changing needs in our education system?

These are deeply complex problems that we need to approach by breaking them down.

One of the things we have learnt over the past few years, is that there are a huge number of people who – like us – see and feel an acute need to develop skills within schools. They might be fellow educators, employers or young people themselves. However, a barrier to mobilising this growing group of people is a lack of shared language or common standards.

Everyone might be working to develop the same skills but, if they are using different language to talk about it, a sense of community and momentum can be lost

This is where we have decided to focus our efforts at Enabling Enterprise: developing resources and tools that help schools to talk about and measure skills development in a clear, consistent way.

Having been used by over 500 teachers in its first year in 2016, our Skillsbuilder tool, combined with our reach into coastal and rural areas, is a key part of this. 

Allowing class teachers to assess their students’ enterprise skills and set them challenging targets will – we hope – give further weight to the notion that skills such as problem-solving are educable and vital to young people’s success.

We have huge ambitions for what we can achieve in the next few years to affect real change on behalf of our young people.

Samantha George will be speaking at the launch of Nesta's new report, Solved! Making the case for collaborative problem solving on Tuesday 7 March.