Amelie catches me unawares. It’s the end of a tiring day that started with a long, circuitous drive, including an hour spent crawling behind a wide-load convoy. Then, a jam-packed few hours at Dunoon Grammar, where a non-stop carousel of students had come to talk to me.

Now, things are more relaxed as we’ve ventured outdoors, and students at the school’s Learning Centre - for young people with complex additional learning needs - are milling around the allotment, where they grow produce to sell.

The autumn sun is fading and I’m in a near reverie, as I remark to a teacher how fortunate the school is to have so many beautiful hills and lochs on its doorstep. Amelie, who’s in S5, decides it’s now or never.

“We actually have one jar of marmalade left, if you would you like to try some of our homemade marmalade?”

Well, I think to myself, I am quite partial to a dollop of marmalade on toast - so I gratefully accept.

The response is instant: “It’s a pound!”

I pat my pockets and, realising my money is in the car, look sheepishly back at Amelie. Headteacher David Mitchell bails me out and chuckles at Amelie’s breezy chutzpah - which is typical of her, and of the go-get-’em mindset instilled in students at Dunoon Grammar.

The school has been making waves across Europe for its work on enterprise and entrepreneurialism. In October, at a ceremony in Helsinki, it was one of the schools across Europe to receive a Entrepreneurial School of the Year award - the first Scottish school to receive the accolade and the first from the UK since 2015.

“Enterprise is part of the everyday life of our school,” says Mitchell. “It might not be taught in every single lesson, but it’s there every day - it really is part of how we deliver our lessons and our curriculum.”

The school has won myriad prizes for the fruits of its business and enterprise education, with app design being a particular strength. Students have come up with prototype apps to ensure effective use of asthma inhalers, reduce carbon footprints, help elderly people to get out of bed, defrost a car without leaving the home and decide which pet is best suited to your lifestyle.

The school’s entrepreneurial nous is now being sought far and wide. For an International Women’s Day event, students’ views on how to get more girls into the technology sector were sought by technology giants such as Spotify; and for Unreasonable Future - a global project to envision how workplaces will look in years to come - Dunoon students provided views that drove a “fireside chat” involving tech entrepreneurs in California.

Dunoon Grammar staff are keen to nail down what they mean by enterprise. They certainly do not want students to emulate the boorishness and cut-throat mentality of contestants on The Apprentice. The school’s approach is more sophisticated, seeing enterprise as a vehicle for creativity that will benefit students in all corners of the curriculum, where the motivation may be the social impact of a product or service rather than the financial spoils.

Seeds of entrepreneurialism

The roots of Dunoon Grammar’s approach can be traced back to 2003. It appears to be the epitome of what was envisaged by Determined to Succeed (DtS) - a national effort to encourage “enterprising values” and a “can-do, will-do” attitude in Scottish schools (see box, page 19).

Paul Gallanagh, principal teacher of business and computing at Dunoon Grammar, says that DtS did have something of an impact but, ultimately, it felt like a “bolt-on” to the main business of school - a view echoed by the shortcomings identified in a DtS evaluation report in 2011.

Instead, Gallanagh says the game-changer for his school’s approach to enterprise was Curriculum for Excellence (CfE), which he believes has liberated teachers.

“This has been more than a decade in the making,” he says. “There’s no doubt that CfE was the catalyst … It opened the door and gave us the freedom to really drive these things. We wanted to open up opportunities where kids could be creative, where they could fail within a safe environment, where they could try things that may or may not work.”

In 2005, then first minister Jack McConnell - a former maths teacher - predicted at a Young Enterprise Scotland conference that entrepreneurialism was a concept that could struggle to take hold in Scotland, as the notorious “Scottish cringe” caused young people to shun ambition and success.

At Dunoon Grammar, however, such concerns sound like something from a bygone age, given the unfettered enthusiasm students show for enterprise projects.

Emma is one of a group of three S2 girls who, while in S1, won a UK Apps for Good Award for Breathe Away, their prototype “smart inhaler” for asthmatic students. She attributes that success largely to the willingness of staff to let students explore their own ideas.

“You could think of pretty much anything …you could just go off and do it,” she recalls.

Another member of the group, Maddie, also relishes the open-ended approach to app design: “I think it’s better than sitting down with a book that tells you all about it - it makes you enjoy it more.”

S6 student Cameron Lees is a member of one of the school’s Young Enterprise companies, which will be making and selling jewellery, and says older students develop good habits for these ventures from experiences gained when they are younger. One example is the Tenner Challenge in S2, in which students attempt to make as much profit as possible from an initial £10.

“Our school has a really good business department that encourages us to do things by ourselves … It’s there to help you but it’s not telling you what to do.”

Fellow S6 student Cerys is more succinct in summing up the staff’s attitude: “Just do it.”

The spirit of enterprise at Dunoon Grammar spreads beyond the business and computing department. At the school’s Learning Centre, for students with additional needs, Mitchell says the “whole curriculum is driven by enterprise”. Amelie, now divested of that last jar of marmalade, talks about growing potatoes, strawberries and onions, then selling them at local galas, fairs and Highland gatherings. Through this, she says, students gain “social skills, green fingers and a sense of money”.

However, students’ entrepreneurial mindset is not channelled purely into turning a financial profit. “We’ve always looked for a social dimension in all that we do - it’s not just about making money, but giving something back,” says Gallanagh.

One of the most popular enterprise projects at the school is the Wood Foundation’s Youth and Philanthropy Initiative (YPI), in which S2 students adopt a charity, visit it and research it, then pitch for a £3,000 award to the chosen charity. Students tell me about their passion for charities as diverse as Rape Crisis Scotland, Cowal Elderly Befrienders, the Terence Higgins Trust and Dunoon Men’s Shed.

“Every single thing we do, there’s a social angle to it - that’s essential,” says Gallanagh.

Altruism, social conscience and a connection to the local community seeps into every enterprise challenge. In 2018, Dunoon students won a UK-wide School of Marketing competition to design a new ice cream with a striped lolly to reflect the LGBT+ pride flag. Another Dunoon team topped the best social media campaign category in a design-a-sandwich competition run by fast-food chain Subway, after coming up with the Brain Booster - a nutritious sandwich designed to keep up the energy levels of students revising for exams.

Broadening horizons

One YPI group’s chosen charity was Olly’s Wee Bothy, which was set up in memory of a 12-year-old friend who died in 2016 after being hit by a tanker near his home; the charity provides holiday accommodation for families who have suffered the death of a child. Mitchell says the group’s pitch for the charity was an “amazing tribute” to their friend.

“There were goosebumps,” he recalls. “I just thought, this was what it was about for me - this is it. This is our whole school coming together as a community to support everybody. That sums up for me what happens here as a school with enterprise, and the ethos around this place.”

The school’s regular success in Scottish, UK and now European enterprise contests has also changed students’ views about where they come from and the idea that living away from the Central Belt hinders their prospects.

Gallanagh smiles at the memory of one boy who travelled down to London after another Dunoon Grammar success, having never been on the ferry out of his home town before, and sparked an airport security alert by trying to carry through a big bottle of Irn Bru.

“Success breeds success [and] it broke a few mindsets that we’re just a rural school out in the sticks - it showed that geography doesn’t matter,” says Gallanagh.

Now, indeed, people seek out the school’s expertise. As well as the aforementioned calls from Spotify and Silicon Valley entrepreneurs, two Dunoon Grammar students were invited to compere this year’s YPI final event in Perth in June - a role previously filled by professional public speakers.

The skills and confidence that students are racking up from S1 onwards are “absolutely supporting their learning in senior school - it isn’t exclusive”, says Mitchell. Recent exam results in the business and computing department have been “spectacular”, and “part of that’s a result of what they’re doing in the junior school”.

The irony is that once students enter the senior phase, for all of the supposed liberation of Curriculum for Excellence, the demands of exams mean that the school cannot offer the same level of open-ended enterprise projects they would have encountered when younger and less confident. Instead, says Gallanagh, the school has tried to find enterprise projects that offer “smaller, quicker hits”, which are “not on the same scale” as the activities that students pursue in S1-3, when “we’ve got the freedom”. When preparing for exams, “sometimes they just need to get the job done - and sometimes it ain’t pretty, and certainly not enterprising”.

“So it is frustrating,” he adds with a rueful chuckle.

Gallanagh also stresses that not every enterprise project is a roaring success. One attempt to create a multimedia tourist guide with Dunoon Burgh Hall - a local creative and cultural hub - fell through because, in retrospect, it was “too grandiose”.

Critically, however, Gallanagh says staff know they have support from school management to take a few risks: “We maybe do squander some budgets now and again, but we’re trying it for the right reasons - we’ve got that belief, we’ve got that freedom and we’ve got that trust.”

All the positivity should perhaps be tempered by an acknowledgement that worries remain about the implications of Scottish schools teaming up with the business world. In September, for example, MSPs expressed concern after Scotland’s chief inspector of education, Gayle Gorman, had praised secondary schools for suggesting that, by inviting in businesses, they were finding “innovative ways” of overcoming the “hardship” of teacher shortages. She later stressed to Tes Scotland, however, that partnerships between schools and employers were “not a solution to addressing teacher shortages”.

But what is the view of Dunoon Grammar outside of the school?

“Love” may not be a word uttered frequently in hard-nosed business circles, but Yvonne McNeilly, Argyll and Bute Council’s lead for education, says that is what drives Dunoon Grammar’s embrace of enterprise projects. National statistics show that the school does well in getting students into “positive destinations”, thanks in no small part, she says, to the determination of staff to present students with as wide an array of entrepreneurial experiences as possible.

“They genuinely love the young people and want the best for them,” she says.

Committed staff

Natalie Moore, director of education at Apps for Good, whose technology training programme promotes entrepreneurship with a social focus, says the school’s staff are “one of the most committed [teams] I’ve ever come across”.

“Nothing is ever too much of an ask and they genuinely believe in giving their young people opportunities that go above and beyond the curriculum, often giving up lunchtimes and time after school for students to finish working on their products,” she says.

Moore adds that the school’s approach is “truly innovative” because it does not rely on one teacher or head to push it forward: “Every single teacher and student understands the importance of a well-rounded education and delivering not just the core curriculum, but also additional opportunities to allow students to leave the school with the best possible future.”

Jonathan Christie, deputy UK director of The Wood Foundation and national manager of the Youth and Philanthropy Initiative Scotland, has been impressed with the impact of students who may previously have struggled at school. He recalls the one young boy who championed Dunoon Men’s Shed, a charity that helps to overcome isolation and loneliness. Initially, he “could not have been any less engaged in the process”, then, after making contact with the charity, became its “most passionate advocate”.

But it is Archie, a S3 student, who most memorably and pithily sums up what students get from enterprise-based projects and competitions at the school.

He says: “It’s not like looking at a textbook and giving answers to questions - you need to come up with the questions yourselves.”

Henry Hepburn is news editor at Tes Scotland

This article originally appeared in the 29 November 2019 issue of Tes Scotland under the headline “Doing away with the ‘Scottish cringe’”