Enterprise in our schools

This spirit of enterprise is a thread that runs through all of our academies- but we know that it will manifest itself differently depending on their context. 

In our atypical schools, there is a greater focus on industry links and an applied education. In our mainstream schools, students learn about, and experience, the range of pathways that could be pursued within each subject area.  Whatever the curriculum, whatever the focus – whether applied or academic, our enterprise provision includes key skills and exposures that are fundamental to an Aldridge school and the Aldridge Advantage we seek to provide.

Each Aldridge school and learning environment fulfils the Trust’s mission, one element of which is enterprise education. At the heart of this lies a blend of skills and experiences which serve to raise aspirations and future-proof our learners – preparing them for life and employment and equipping them to handle whatever the future holds for them.

We combine life skills with both disciplinary skills and our Aldridge Attributes in order to equip our learners.

We provide exposure to cultural, social and employment experiences to build aspiration and vision for the future.  We explore these experiences with our learners to ensure that they capture all the richness and potential of the exposure they have received, that they think, that they question, that they create.

All Aldridge schools and learning establishments will fulfil the enterprise agenda of the trust.  Some of the components of this will be consistent across all schools; others will be unique to particular schools, as part of their individual character and ethos.

The trust distinguishes between its mainstream schools and those that are atypical.  Whilst all of our schools fulfil our universal enterprise agenda and deliver the Gatsby benchmarks as a minimum offer around the world of work, our atypical schools in particular focus in on applied academics and therefore have tight partnership with our elite industry partners.  Our mainstream schools in contrast, often focus in on academics with more emphasis on having time for an EBACC+ programme and without a sector-specific focus to the disciplinary skills they embed.