We need to teach entrepreneurialism in schools

In particular, we need to teach them how to think in an entrepreneurial way.

The kind of skills that entrepreneurs need to create successful businesses — resourcefulness, creativity, flexibility, determination, focus — are the very skills that young people will increasingly need to survive in a fast-changing workplace, where jobs for life are a thing of the past.

As the serial entrepreneur Doug Richards says: “You don’t have to become an entrepreneur to find an entrepreneurship education valuable. If we don’t teach people the economics of society and how the world works, and that most of the value in society comes from entrepreneurial activity, then all we create is a group of uninformed citizens who are simply prey to be taken advantage of.”

Learning entrepreneurship gives young people the confidence to think for themselves. Mark Steed, headmaster of Berkhamsted School, an independent school in Hertfordshire, says it is a useful counterpoint to the rest of the school curriculum. “There is an enormous dislocation between secondary school education and the world of work,” he said. “The exam system is breeding a generation of accountants. It rewards people who are accurate and careful rather than people who take risks.

“We need to encourage risk taking and creative thought and to allow people to come up with quirky solutions to problems. That is what entrepreneurship is all about. It about giving young people the licence to take risks.”

But — and it is a big but — as the primary school’s ill-fated Christmas fair experience shows, we do need to tread carefully.

In the race to excite our children about enterprise and entrepreneurship we also need to think hard about what values we are teaching them, and why. We need to be aware of the dangers of promoting the idea that making money is to be prized above all else. Instead the focus should be on finding better ways of doing things and on thinking in new ways to solve real problems.

Most successful entrepreneurs don’t start businesses just to make stacks of money; they start businesses because they are passionate about creating something, because they have found a better way of doing something and because they want to take control of their lives. It is important not to lose sight of that.

Perhaps Oli Barrett puts it best. He is the creator of the Tenner schools competition, in which pupils are given £10 to start a business. They have a month to make as much profit as possible while also trying to make a difference and give back to society.

He says: “If you boil enterprise education down to just being about making money then you have missed the point. The point of the exercise is to unlock creativity and to challenge people to create something of value which has the ability to make a difference.

“If you jump from let’s have enterprise in our schools to everybody should start a business, you have made too great a leap. The essence of enterprise education should be about giving young people a taste of having their own ideas and making those ideas happen, regardless of what they want to go on and do.”

Less shouting and more thinking about how young people understand enterprise is certainly the right way forward.

Rachel Bridge is an author, public speaker and journalist specialising in entrepreneurship and SMEs

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