Eighteen months ago, the Department for Education and Skills recognised the need for a unique and innovative unit responsible for managing and developing long term, strategic relationships with appropriate business partners. Briefing asks the team’s director how it all works.
What’s the role of the Business Development Unit?
The government is well aware of how involved UK businesses are in young people’s education. That future education policy needs to incorporate the needs of tomorrow’s businesses is also very apparent to us. Yet, until recently, there’s been no one to coordinate these mutual aims – that’s the gap we were set up to fill.
And how exactly are you working with business?
In two ways really. Acting as a communication hub is of prime importance to us. We speak to companies about their needs and interests, informing them about Departmental initiatives and policy development and also feed into internal policy making channels here in the DfES, advising Ministers on trends and developments in the corporate sector. Our second role is to help develop appropriate mutually beneficial partnerships with companies. So working with companies during Science Year to address the industry’s expressed recruitment problem, for example, is just the kind of project we look to initiate. The Science Year KitPot, a resource-donation scheme that has already resulted in every primary school and most secondary schools in the UK receiving an electronic microscope.
Isn’t this opening the DfES up to ‘corporate washing’?
No, most definitely not. We work to stringent Cabinet Office guidelines that guard against companies deriving any hint of commercial benefit from their involvement with DfES. Our engagement with business works to be mutually beneficial.. It’s corporate opinion we’re concerned with, not corporate influence.
What’s in it for companies then?
If nothing else, we provide a single point of call which companies can contact when they require advice on what’s what in the DfES! The hundreds of companies we’re talking to find this kind of two-way dialogue invaluable in designing and leveraging up their education activities.
As well as the obvious benefits of higher standards in schools, there’s also the significant reputation rewards to be won by investing effectively in education. Our work with Barclays on the launch of Citizenship into the curriculum this September highlights this mutual-benefit approach. Young people are set to get a better sense of their rights and responsibilities as citizens from the resources Barclays are providing, while the company also gets to strengthen its association with the citizenship agenda.
Lynn joined the DfES Business Development Unit as its first director. She heads up a team of eight.
Immediately prior to this, Lynn was the Education Manager for London & Southern England for the New Millennium Experience Company. Over a period of three years she was responsible for developing and delivering major national learning experience programmes for education in partnership with multinational companies.
Lynn – a graduate in biochemistry – began work with the research team of the Royal Free Hospital, London. She then retrained into Personnel and Training Management, leading to management roles with Drake Personnel and Charles Kendall & Partners. After a move to Bristol, Lynn joined Learning Partnership West, with responsibility for managing the interface between education and industry in the South West.
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