The increased interest in social and community enterprises, and their role in social and economic regeneration, has been underlined by the publication, on July 23, 2002, of the Social Enterprise Strategy by the UK Government.[1] Alongside the growth in the sector, the need for education and training to both improve performance and support those employed within the sector has been recognized. The DTI Strategy emphasizes the importance of education and training as a tool for capacity building, sharing knowledge, and communicating best practice throughout the sector. This paper focuses on education, training, and learning in the social and community enterprise sector, concentrating in particular on those who are who are leading their organizations or at least aspiring to these positions.

The scope of education and training within the social and community enterprise sector is reviewed. This reveals a distinct gap in provision of rigorous evidence-based learning that is nevertheless firmly rooted in practice for leaders at senior management level. For this group, issues concerning time, cost, method, content, availability, and effectiveness of management education and training, including implementation of learning, are particularly important. These issues are discussed in the paper and the way in which they informed the development of the part-time Masters program in Community Enterprise offered by the Judge Institute of Management, University of Cambridge, are outlined.

Data on the value the students have obtained from the course has been collected regularly from students and this shows five key benefits arising from the course: implementation of organizational learning;learning new developments;gaining a more strategic perspective;networking opportunities; andpersonal development.

The teaching philosophy and the students’ responses in these areas are analyzed and conclusions are drawn on the educational needs of leaders in the sector and how they can best be addressed.

In conclusion, given the increasing importance of social and community enterprises, there is potentially a large market for management education for chief executives and senior personnel who lead these organizations. These students need tailor-made programs to ensure that the material they are taught is relevant to their immediate needs as well as being of longer-term benefit. They need considerable support to ensure they can cope with the demands of part-time academic study while also running demanding and often fragile organizations. However, if this can be managed the immediate benefits to the participants are real and have, in many of our students’ cases, transferred into direct gains in winning additional resources, and/or in managing the resources they have more efficiently and effectively.

Such high-quality courses are, however, expensive and unlikely to be affordable by many of those most able to benefit from the degree. Bursaries to enable leaders from the sector to join such courses are urgently required. Governments, local authorities, and charities supporting these organizations need to recognize the benefit of encouraging the organizations that they support to take part in such training and to include resources for this in their budgets.

Volume 28

Number 9-10