Enterprise in Higher Education Initiative:

Enterprise in Higher Education (EHE) aimed to integrate business training and enterprise into the mainstream curricula of arts, science and social sciences within Higher Education Institutions (HEIs). It was funded by the Training Agency of the Government's Education Department. In the first year, eighty-six funding proposals for pilot projects were submitted, with eleven selected to laucnh their EHE initiative. Each insittution selected was required to demonstrate that they could introduce enterprise into the curriculum using links with employers, and that they had a strategy for staff development to deliver the enterprise currciculum.

The overall aim of the EHE initiative was to develop more enterprising graduates and enahnce the transferable personal skills of graduates from all disciplines. These skills were to be acquired through project-based work designed to be undertaken in a real economic setting to be jointly assessed by employers and HEIs. EHE also aimed to contribute to the production of graduates aware of the needs of industry and commerce with direct experience of the world of work, who would ultimately leave higher education better prepared for working life.

The EHE initiative had a strong evaluative element and a project team from the Tavistock Institute of Human Relations was commissioned by the Training Agency (TA) to provide support to HEIs with the local evaluation of their programmes. The team from the Tavistock Insitute worked alongside local evaluators to try and make evaluation part and process of the programme rather than an externally enforced element. Tavistock advised on the methods and processes of local evaluation, but the HEIs set out their own evaluative strategies and questions in order to highlight areas of improvement in their own individual initiatives.

Evaluation and analysis was required by the TA for management purposes and audit purposes to prove to the Treasury that it was worth the money being put into it. The TA also required this evaluation to assess whether the scheme could be rolled out nationally and to support subsequent rounds of funding. The purposes of the evaluation were to ascertain whether the objectives of EHE were met, assess the cost effectiveness of the initiative, feed back information from EHE projects to assist in the development of others, enable the Training Commission to monitor progress generally and plan for future provision, and to allow assessment of the impact of EHE on the labour market.