Mr Thomas Minnock
Teaching Awards 2008 Winner
The Teaching Award for Enterprise
Linton Village College, CAMBRIDGE
The students of Linton Village College know it pays to be entrepreneurial. Last year a group of them made £1.3m on an investment of £100,000 in just four months, beating 8,000 other school groups in a national competition.
They know – because Tom Minnock has taught them -- that you build your confidence and self-esteem by taking risks and learning from your mistakes.
These values now lie at the heart of this thriving college’s enterprise culture, and imbue all aspects of learning. In fact the college’s head says that the emphasis on enterprise is the key to the college’s rapid recent improvement -- eighty per cent of pupils now get five top grade GCSEs.
For Tom, teaching enterprise means putting students in real situations where they take responsibility for what they are doing and measure their own success. He has built close links with the local business community and all Year Eight pupils get workplace experience, in one of 60 local businesses. In Year Nine pupils do a four-month, cross-curricular enterprise project, working in teams to manufacture and sell real products – and to make real profits. Businesses say they cannot refuse him when he asks for help.
Tom’s department is a National Centre of Excellence in Enterprise and he has opened the eyes of many other schools to the entrepreneurial approach. He has written articles, organised conferences and mentored colleagues. He has also built a strong link with schools in South Africa, where his enthusiasm for enterprise extends.
Tom believes in giving students their own voice, and allows them opportunities to take charge and deliver lessons, as well as evaluating their own progress. A visiting school inspector described one of his lessons as “truly outstanding – and not a word was written.”
Students said his faith them allowed them to have faith in themselves, and one summed him up as “inspirational, motivational, fun”.
Colleagues told judges: “You come away enriched from any conversation you have with Tom. It is often a career-changing conversation.”
