Reports and Resources

Evaluation of the Social Enterprise in Schools program in North East Victoria

During 2018 ACRE worked with seven schools who have agreed to participate in the Social Enterprise Schools Teacher Toolkit and Curriculum Co-design team this year.  The Co-design team will be assisting  with the development of teacher resources for the program that align with the Victorian Curriculum Foundation – 10.

The intent of aligning the toolkit to the curriculum, is to make it easier for teachers to teach and assess the progression of student learning.  We have commissioned Michelle Anderson and Adrian Beavis from Interface2Consulting to lead this project again and we will be working closely with the Victorian Curriculum Assessment Authority (VCAA), who are generously supporting this project.

The Social Enterprise Schools pilot started at the end of August 2015 and was designed to evaluate how learning via a social enterprise develops a range of skills in students. The pilot program was also an opportunity to look at how the program builds confidence, increases self-esteem and enriches a sense of social justice in young people and to learn more about the skills developed from the program.

The key skills developed included numeracy, literacy and creative thinking skills but also the program was also seen to provide learning opportunities that were engaging and inclusive and suitable for any age and ability.+

As part of the the pilot program we set out the criteria by which the programs success was to be measured. The program needed to be:

Entrepreneurial: the students should be directly involved in producing goods or providing services to a market;

Led by students: the social enterprise should be driven and run by students with support from teachers and parents;

Dynamic: The social enterprises should aspire to make a positive change to peoples lives.

The pilot program was designed to inform decisions-making about the feasibility of extending the program to more locations across Victoria.

The key evaluation findings of the pilot program were released in 2017 with a full copy of the Report now available.