EDUCATION CORNER PODCAST
EDUCATION CORNER PODCAST INTERVIEW WITH
Julian Hall CEO OF ULTRA EDUCATION
Julian Hall speaks about his work as the founder and CEO of Ultra Education, which primarily works with children and young people, regardless of their background or social standing, to enable them to have access to essential entrepreneurial education. He also founded AskUltra, which offers AI-powered chatbot tuition for children, and has written three books including Entrepreneur to Ultrapreneur. Can you tell us a little about the work that you do in primary and secondary schools?
Of course! The work we’re implementing in schools today has become a number of different programmes. Sometimes, we go in and reinforce an area of learning that’s already happening, for example, we might go in and take over PSHE, or Design and Technology, or Literacy, or it could be an area of enrichment, or an after-school club. Usually, we use entrepreneurial skills and development as a tool in schools to plug gaps or teach it as a topic on its own. For example, when students are signing up for Business Studies, they think that it will help them to start a business, but actually it doesn’t – that’s not what Business Studies is about, it’s about studying other businesses. And often, those businesses are so grand and lofty, and have been around for so many decades, that as a student, you can’t really pull 42 | EDUCATION CHOICES MAGAZINE | S P R I N G 2 02 3
anything useful or actionable from that study. So, now we go in and deliver what a student would expect to be Business Studies - things like how to set up a business - we go in and deliver these dedicated lessons, programmes and workshops. It takes that form, or rather a teacher might think that it is actually a really good way to get learning outcomes for some of their other lessons. Whether it’s Maths, English or even History, there’s ways we can angle entrepreneurship to serve a number of different subjects and help teachers achieve other learning outcomes. So, again, we used it in a multifaceted way which keeps the work interesting for us and shows the diversity of approach that you can take with entrepreneurial education. I’m assuming you go into both maintained and independent schools?
Yes, we do.
Why do you think that ‘entrepreneurship’ is so important as a part of education? For example, do you think it should be a subject that can be taken through to GCSE?
Entrepreneurship is important in education because it’s a part of real life. The vast majority of the UK economy is based on small to medium-sized enterprises. They’re on our high streets, mobile
