EthCo sets out to provide a task-based framework to allow young people to explore the concept of ethics in business and to contextualise that within Scotland’s place in the world economy. The UN’s Millennium Development Goals impact on world poverty and growth, and a key function of EthCo is to promote those Goals.
Through EthCo, pupils will be encouraged to see how the choices made by individuals within businesses, organisations and communities impact on economic life in their own and other countries. Using action-based enterprise activities they will take the first steps towards ‘making a difference’, through positive challenges to existing practices, illustrating that consumer and citizen power can impact on poverty reduction and economic success. Pupils will learn about, and raise awareness of, the ‘Millennium Development Goals’ to their families, their communities and local businesses.
Young people are the employers, employees, and community activists of the future and EthCo hopes to embed a global perspective for the longer term. They, along with their teachers and their communities, hold the key to implementing actions which impact on the Millennium Development Goals. It is hoped that their energy and hope for the future may be harnessed, and their actions and attitudes affected, by learning how ethical companies operate.
EthCo will provide approaches and materials within a ‘Curriculum for Excellence’ to link together Development Education, Enterprise Education, Financial awareness, understanding of business, citizenship education, education for sustainable development, and other cross-cutting themes. These are brought together in the EthCo interdisciplinary Tasks and, since the tasks contribute to many of the Learning Outcomes in the Curricular Areas of CfE, can be built in as part of the on-going curriculum.
Pupil Led—Teacher Prompted: EthCo is not a topic, but rather an open ended process which teachers are free to adapt to their own curricular needs. It is envisaged that EthCo will run as an enterprise activity based on a real task, and is set up to provide appropriate learning outcomes within ACfE. As such EthCo encourages interdisciplinary learning between, and across the Curricular areas. It is focused on international education, and is designed to fit in with a range of existing initiatives available to schools, such as Eco Schools, financial education, social enterprise and others.
Each of the three age-based tasks can be visited independently or concurrently as pupils progress from primary to secondary through their school lives. They are matched to the following Curriculum for Excellence levels:
- First level: Developing Countries: global awareness, what is a company and what are the Millennium Development Goals?
- Second level: How do company ethics and individual behaviour impact upon the Millennium Development Goals?
- Third level: Ethics in business, company codes of conduct, financial and labour market irregularity.
Each task facilitates learning via a thinking ⁄ discussing phase, a research phase and a doing phase, and finishes on a demonstration of learning outcome. Timescale for the task is at the discretion of staff.