Learning and Teaching           Effective approaches to learning and teaching will make a direct contribution to pupils' experience of enterprise in education, and is relevant to every young person in Scotland. Well-designed programmes have confirmed that enterprise in education can offer opportunities and experiences which meet the full range of needs of young people of all abilities, interests and aspirations. The breadth of scope of enterprise in education, reflected in the rich diversity evident in effective programmes, makes valuable experience available which is appropriate to the full spectrum of young people's needs including, importantly, additional support needs. For example, enterprise activities allow very wide scope for pupils' creativity, imagination and intellectual challenge. Effective career education provides comprehensive opportunities for all young people to reflect on their talents and interests, and align these with potential career routes and lifelong learning choices. Work experience and vocational programmes give young people scope to show their skills in a range of contexts not available in schools. Such wider opportunities promote achievement and meet needs, including the need to experience success, even where other approaches to the curriculum and learning and teaching are less effective. 

Programmes in enterprise in education provide an important stimulus and opportunities and contexts for young people to extend and refine their personal and social skills, and to experience success in a wide range of settings. Enterprise in education brings young people into contact with adults other than teachers, for example in work experience, community projects and other enterprise activities, and 'raises the bar' in terms of the young people's awareness of appropriate attitudes and behaviour. Programmes in personal and social development can act as an integrating influence for the different parts of enterprise in education. For example, they enhance career education and personal review, target setting and planning. The constructive overlap with other key personal and social priorities such as citizenship underlines the value of enterprise in education.

The identity of career education, its purposes and activities, will rightly differ significantly across the stages from early years to the senior stages of secondary schools. For the early stages, the focus will be on encouraging an awareness of the nature of work and the different forms of 'jobs' which people do and the 'roles' they fill including worker, student, employer and entrepreneur. These will be progressively related to young people's own growing awareness of their talents, interests and aspirations. By the later stages of secondary school, programmes will be increasingly focused on providing young people with the best possible service for career information, advice and guidance. The growth in the use of curriculum flexibility to provide vocational programmes, often in productive partnerships with further education colleges, has been a significant development. One important, continuing theme is that stereotypes of any kind, such as those associated with gender or with particular forms of work, are actively challenged.

A further objective is to ensure that enterprise in education becomes as closely integrated into learning in the context of subjects and areas of the curriculum as is possible.