Don’t Forget About Small Business
During last night's Education & Skills work stream meeting, there was a lot of talk about getting businesses to assist with schools and children locally to help improve maths results. A worthy and knoble cause and definitely a step in the right direction. However, one comment made my blood boil..."let's get big businesses in to talk to the kids, companies like Tescos."
The Joy of SMEs
There is nothing wrong with wanting big businesses to get involved in the local community & education, however I think it is incredibly short sighted to constantly trot out the same ‘big business’ names time and time again.
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Don’t get me wrong, there are some excellent and aspirational big businesses in the local area, Astrium, Warings, Wiggle & Fat Face for instance. However, for each big business in the local area there are far more ‘small businesses’.
I run a small business, but I like to think that we are an aspirational company. We build websites and apps for major companies as well as ourselves. All of our work requires a level of maths, some areas more than others.
I also personally know the owners of other small businesses where maths is used day in day out, for instance:
- Bar & Restaurant – working out profit & loss, bulk order discounts, wastage %
- Search engine marketing company – working out improvements in rankings, % variation on previous months
- Company that tracks the movement of 30,000 ships & 8,000 planes across the world – server optimisation, data loads, triangulation
- Digital imagery company producing CGI images for architecture & marine clients – lighting angles, camera angles
Each one of these businesses uses maths in their day to day business operations along with the usual working out profit margins, P&L accounts, payrolls, bonuses etc etc.
Give SMEs a Chance
There are a lot of commitments when running a small business, your time is precious and you have to be careful you are doing the most important / profitable things at the right time. However, I don’t think it is above any owner of a small business to allocate one day a quarter to help schools and children improve their results.
A relatively small improvement in maths for the children in the area will take Portsmouth schools from being 148th out of 152 schools nationally to sitting in the middle of the table.
There is a new initative being worked on getting local businesses working with small groups of kids in the workplace and helping them understand the real world uses for maths. I will post more about this when the time comes.
