1. Adult Enterprise
“How do we keep building the business,
how do we keep refreshing the product,
how do we keep focusing on the social
purpose.”
Christina Conroy OBE
Chief Executive, Adult
Enterprise Ltd

2. Introduction
Overview and background to the project
‘New initiatives’ are by definition fleeting. Developed by the
creatives amongst us – the idea-smiths, the dreamers, the thinkers
– they are essential to the forward motion of the paradigm in which
we live and work. But what happens to a new initiative when it’s no
longer new and the seed money that got it started comes to an end?
No one understands this dilemma
more than professional entrepreneur
Christina Conroy, Chief Executive of Adult
Enterprise. ‘Professional’, because Christina’s
business is the development of the entrepreneurial spirit
and skills of others.
Have the team’s own
entrepreneurial skills
enabled its new
initiative to become a
sustainable business?
In 2011, Christina Conroy was the Principal of Richmond
Adult Community College with a business problem to
solve. She wanted to contribute to her region’s economic recovery by developing entrepreneurial
skills programmes, but was thwarted by the lack of courses on the National Qualifications
Framework. Her new initiative was to team up with nine other disparate organisations to create
not only a new qualification framework, but the courses, blended learning materials and a shared
learning platform to make it all work seamlessly.
Backed by the Association of Colleges (AoC) and a grant from the Skills Funding Agency (SFA),
Christina Conroy and her team set to work developing the new infrastructure and curriculum. In
2012, that grant funding came to an end. This case study looks at what happened next. Have the
team’s own entrepreneurial skills enabled its new initiative to become a sustainable business?
Development
Progress since November 2012
The original idea was to create the new curriculum for the benefit of the ten partners but, as often
happens, the project increased its ambition as confidence in its ideas grew and new problems and
challenges emerged. Not least of these was the need for sustainability once the grant funding had
come to an end.
During the grant funding period, most of the building blocks of the new partnership were
completed, including the setting up of the new joint venture company, Adult Enterprise Ltd.
(Further detail on the background to this project can be found on the AoC website in the first case
study on the Adult Enterprise project developed in November 2012 1.)
1 Davis, T. (2012) Adult Enterprise: New approach, new framework. AoC. Available at
http://www.aoc.co.uk/shared_services/material/shared_curriculum

3. The grant funding was only sufficient to enable the project to develop the Level 2 curriculum. The
solution to funding the follow-on period, including the writing of the Level 3 curriculum offer,
came from the core of their social enterprise model: to work for the benefit of all members. So
membership was offered to the rest of the sector, and with over thirty Colleges and adult and
community learning providers signing up, funding was secured to take the project forward, at
least for another year.
Members were given full access to the
entire new curriculum with no cap on
the number of learners they could sign
up. Members could also base their
provision on Adult Enterprise’s learning
platform, and receive training for their
trainers on how to deliver blended
learning programmes successfully.
For North Hertfordshire College (NHC),
this keen focus on entrepreneurship was
a snug fit with its ethos to ‘create
entrepreneurial mind-sets for all students
and all futures’. The College saw an
opportunity to capture the mood of the
moment, and set up a new Enterprise Shop in the heart of their community.
For Helen Robinson, Deputy Head of Adult Learning at NHC, this has meant that: “We can now
tailor a new type of provision to meet our new type of student and help our local business
community grow – even if it’s only in a small way at first. You don’t need qualifications to set up
a business, you need skills. So we take time to understand the skills our Adult Enterprise students
already have, and those they need to develop to be successful.” Helen’s team then selects the units
most appropriate to the learners’ needs and builds training programmes to help them start their
businesses.
“The students can do the whole programme if they want to, or add more units as and when they
need, but we also knew when we started that Level 3 provision would be coming
on stream soon, so we’ve been keen to show students that we can work with
them in the long term – helping their skills grow so that their businesses
can grow too.”
“It’s great provision, because all of the work has been done for
anyone who wants to deliver it. All of the teaching materials
are there and you get access to their Moodle. It’s as
off-the-shelf as it can be, and it makes the tutor’s job, and
IVing [internal verification], really easy.”
Helen is also pleased with how her team of staff is
influencing the delivery of the courses. “They’ve all run
or are running their own businesses as well as being great
teachers. One is an expert in financial management and
another in social media, so we make sure that we structure
the delivery to make the most of each teacher’s skills.”
As the business and curriculum models developed hand in
hand, Christina Conroy and her team became increasingly
2

4. aware of the essential, but all-too–often- missing, ingredient for success. “With a blended learning
product, the teacher on the ground is a really important vector for quality,” says Christina. “If the
teacher isn’t fully committed to it, it won’t happen, or they’ll find problems with it, or they’ll say it
doesn’t work.”
At Hammersmith and Fulham College, getting the recipe right has led to over 100 enrolments in
its pilot year.
At Hammersmith and Fulham College, getting the recipe right has led to over 100 enrolments in
its pilot year.“It’s a product that needs to be led from the middle,” states Christina Conroy. “So
what I’m saying now is if you can’t lead it from the middle, it’s probably not the right product for
you.”
Outcomes
Delivery model
For most of the shared services projects, deciding on the appropriate legal entity was agonising,
heavily debated and costly in terms of legal fees. One benefit of the projects being funded by

5. public money is that the
sector owns the research,
and with the AoC publishing all of the projects’
findings, this should mean
that extensive fact-finding
journeys don’t have to be
repeated by others.
However, Christina Conroy
urges caution in simply
copying their solution, as
the final choice of legal
entity was a moral one in
response to the small print
in the SFA grant contract.
Adult Enterprise was set
up as a not-for-profit joint venture company, limited by guarantee. This was because the SFA
contract required ownership of the copyright in the materials produced within the grant funding
period. The final legal entity, then, had to be set up as a custodian of this copyright, to which all of
the materials were novated once the limited company was incorporated. If the business model of
another consortium requires it to make profit, then the choice of a not-for-profit social enterprise
company limited by guarantee may not be appropriate.
The transition was smooth, though, says Christina Conroy. “The original partnership pretty much
morphed into the Board of the newly incorporated company, and we recruited two additional
dynamic principals to help steer the new ship forward.”
Impact on the organisation, staff and students
The main initial impact on partners has been to: “Get them into the entrepreneurship skills
training space where they wouldn’t have been otherwise,” says Christina Conroy. For instance, the
City of Bath College has partnered with a local social housing organisation, which has given them
free space in the city centre to set up an incubator unit around Adult Enterprise provision. The
initial success, like that of the North Hertfordshire College Enterprise Shop, “…is to make a
community impact,” says Christina – to make entrepreneurship training visible and accessible.
Time will tell how many new entrepreneurs and new businesses blossom
as a result.
Make
Rob Sibley, of the City of Bath
College’s Incubator Unit says: “It’s
entrepreneurship
early days yet, but of our fifteen
training visible
learners we’ve now got three
and accessible.
new businesses, and I’m sure
here’ll be more soon. Our
partnership with the neighbourhood centre helps a lot
as we can provide rent-free space to new businesses
while they find their feet.” Unlike the NHC approach,
earners study the full qualification rather than a
pick-and-mix approach: “We felt that while our
learners may already have skills in some of the areas,
working through all of the units in a new team of

6. like-minded learners, supported by great business mentors,
can only increase their chances of success. It also means
they’re with us for longer and so have access to help and
support built in to the start of their business.”
As part of the grant fund project, Christina Conroy’s
team also produced an Innovation Manual1 to help
others develop creative solutions to problems. It begins
with a case study on their own journey together with:
new models of leadership through co-creation;
using the Innovation Code;
creating a blended learning solution;
e-learnification;
creating a shared learning platform;
managing a virtual team;
brand development in a shared environment;
models for network generation for sharing and sustaining.
Savings
Precise savings figures are notoriously difficult, particularly when the project is about helping
other organisations save money rather than your own. Christina Conroy is confident, however,
that the Adult Enterprise project is not just about curriculum culture change, it’s also about the
bottom line.
“Over the last six months, enrolments have gathered momentum and our partners have provided
500 125-hour courses in 50 groups,” says Christina. If they’d been delivered using a traditional
face-to-face model they would have required a further 60 hours per group to achieve the same
outcomes. As the number of partners and enrolments increases over the coming years, this initial
saving of around £150,000 looks set to grow exponentially.
For many Colleges, this strong emphasis on a technology-enhanced blend of traditional
face-to-face teaching with remote, non-synchronous online learning meets two key agendas: the
reduction in the cost of delivering front-line services, and the new key focus of the Common
Inspection Framework, which is to develop learners’ independent learning skills.
1 Conroy, C. (2012) The Innovation Manual. AoC. Available at
http://www.aoc.co.uk/shared_services/material/shared_curriculum

7. Sustainability and expected longer-term impact
Now in its third year, the Adult Enterprise Board is looking back at what it’s achieved as well as
forward to the future.
“We’re at stage three now,” says Christina Conroy. “We’ve got a sustainable membership structure,
but how do we keeping building the business, how do we keep refreshing the product, how do we
keep focusing on the social purpose?” These questions may lead to a refining of the
membership costs and benefits, aligning them more closely with the numbers of learner
enrolments and amount of staff training required. It may even lead to the development of new
delivery models where the teacher role is replaced by a business mentor who
supports the learner through a full e-learning programme. Whatever the detail,
Christina Conroy is excited about the move into new markets and the
development of new materials.
A recent bid to produce a Level 1 course for black and minority
ethnic learners could merge entrepreneurship training with ESOL
provision, enabling learners for whom English is not their first
language to remove a barrier to starting their own business. The
team is also in negotiations with the Higher Education Academy,
looking at how to use its new curriculum to help set up HE
student enterprise societies to provide students with
entrepreneurship training throughout their university courses.
Christina Conroy is not afraid to explore new sectors and new
markets, and is now looking at opportunities in the private sector.
Following initial conversations with Ford Motor Company, for
instance, the Adult Enterprise curriculum may well be used to form

8. a key part of its employee development programme – to
develop staff’s employability skills so that they can make
a more proactive contribution to the business.
Replicability for the wider FE sector
As can be seen from this case study, Christina and her
Board are anything but complacent. They live by, and
recommend to others, the co-creation of new initiatives
through partnership working. They have published the
tools and strategies for their success and have recently
added a more focused summary version to help others on
their way1.
So whether you would like to add Adult Enterprise provision
to your own portfolio of courses, introduce a blended learning
approach your own provision, or begin your own collaboration,
the tools and experience have been shared to give your own new
initiative the best chance of success.
1 Conroy, C. (2012) The Innovation Manual. AoC. Available at
http://www.aoc.co.uk/shared_services/material/shared_curriculum

9. With thanks to all project partners who contributed to the
development of this case study and consultant
Tony Davis, Director,
Learning & Skills Consultancy and Research
The Association of Colleges 2013
2-5 Stedham Place, London, WC1A 1HU
Tel: 020 7034 9900 Fax: 020 7034 9955
Email: projects@aoc.co.uk website: www.aoc.co.uk