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 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 phones, we buy from them, they employ millions of people and they form parts of our communities and ecosystems. But, knowing how to do that isn’t accessible until adult life, and so we’re missing out a massive chunk of opportunity in helping children and young people to understand how they can set up their own businesses if it’s not in education. It’s such an essential part of, whether it’s the UK economy, or part of how you consider what your career could be without discussing that. It just feels like a huge chunk of real life that’s missing.

This second thing was kind of wrapped up in a 2014 report called “Enterprise for All”, published by Lord Young and a group of enterprise educators, which coined this idea of a “fourth ‘r’”. So you’ve got reading, writing, arithmetic and relevance, which says that enterprise and entrepreneurship and the education behind it is a really good way to make core academics relevant. I’m sure there’s a student sitting in class right now thinking: “How is this relevant to my life?” No matter what the topic is, I’m sure someone’s sitting there right now thinking that. So, what enterprise and entrepreneurial education does, is that it helps to bridge the gap between what you’re learning today and how it could be applied in the working world, whether that’s working for someone else or working for yourself. The reason why that’s important is because we know that there’s a skills gap in the UK, which is essentially the gap between the skillset young people leave education with, whether that’s sixth form, college or university, and what employers are looking for. Entrepreneurship and entrepreneurial

Sustainability and entrepreneurship

education helps fill that gap really nicely because you get to learn about businesses and about what it is to set one up and run one, and all the things that go around that, which then helps to make that transition into the working world a lot easier.

It could be argued that, as well as entrepreneurship, it’s life skills in general that form part of that skills gap; things like how to change a tyre, how to cope when you run out of petrol, how to budget weekly. It all becomes a big part of the gap between doing English, Maths and Science and real life. Yes, absolutely, and I think that’s where you find individuals like myself will differentiate between entrepreneurship and an entrepreneurial skill set, an entrepreneurial mindset. Entrepreneurship is more about the exercise of starting your own business and all the rest of it, but an entrepreneurial mindset and skill set can be applied to life in general, so I think you’re absolutely right.

On the Ultra Education website it states that the work that you do is focused on those from black and ethnic minority communities and those for whom the existing education system does not deliver – why do you think this is the case?

As an example, I was born and raised in Brent, North West London, and both of my parents are from the Caribbean. Statistically, boys of Caribbean heritage born in Brent are academically some of the lowest performing in the country, and this has been the case for a while. Given that I’m that demographic, but I have probably increased my life chances by ten or twenty times, then what is it that I’ve done that’s been different? I believe the difference was my experience with entrepreneurship. I believe it gave me a mindset and a skill set that essentially helped to increase my life chances. Unfortunately, that statistic still rages on, it’s decades old, it’s still the issue now, and there are lots of other underrepresented communities and individuals who are maybe neurodiverse. We all know the statistics, even if you want to start a business or have a rockstar career, if you’re female, you get less than 1% of VC funding, you’re not going to be on boards, all of this stuff, these are barriers that we have in society. For us, the focus is on helping those individuals through race, gender, or other barriers to circumvent them, it just so happens that entrepreneurship is a really good way of doing that. There are other ways too, but entrepreneurship and entrepreneurial thinking and skill sets can help you to either leap over those barriers and overcome them or to pick yourself up if you fall prey to them.

We have met at the House of Lords a couple of times discussing ‘Entrepreneurship in Education’. How do you think that schools and universities can support young people further to develop and take the risks that entrepreneurship requires?

I think there’s still a level of understanding needed, by education in general, to see where entrepreneurship sits. There is still a disconnection between what it means to be an entrepreneur or be in business and education – they seem to still clash a lot. Very forwardthinking schools, like Putney High School, will identify that there is a core relationship between the two, and that there is an essential need for their students to understand it. Loads of other schools do recognise it, but don’t necessarily have the capacity and resources, someone that can be dedicated to it, or the funding to pay for programmes and so on. So, from the point of view of the Department for Education, they would say – and have said to me in the recent past – that schools and teachers are given enough room and autonomy within the national curriculum to teach this, and that they are encouraged to teach financial literacy and entrepreneurship in lessons like PSHE. My response to that is that teachers and schools aren’t measured on that, so they aren’t going to perform well on it. Those subjects are still very badly resourced, so if teachers don’t know how to teach it and there aren’t enough resources, then they’re not going to be able to do it.

I also think that a more subtle, yet still important dynamic, particularly in lower income areas, is that if the teachers don’t believe the students can do it then they probably won’t teach it. If the teachers have a low expectation of student outcomes, then they’ll teach to that level. So, I think that examples of entrepreneurs who don’t come from middle-class backgrounds, enabling the realisation that entrepreneurship can be accessed by anyone, is needed to open the eyes of teachers so they can see that it’s possible too. Just because someone’s not born in the “right” postcode, doesn’t mean that they don’t have the capability to start their own business.

Finally, what is your vision for the future of entrepreneurship in education going forwards? I remember when I was asked this question a few years back, and at the time my answer was that entrepreneurship would be on the curriculum, and the interviewer said, “If entrepreneurship is on the curriculum, then you’d be out of a job, wouldn’t you?”, and I said, “I’m an entrepreneur, I’m sure I can figure something else out.”

Now my response wouldn’t necessarily be that entrepreneurship is just on the curriculum, but that, as our mission statement is, we want to be in a world where effective entrepreneurial education is available and accessible for children everywhere, whether they’re in a state school, independent school, primary school, a PRU, an alternative provision, or a home-school. If a child wants to learn Spanish or Maths, there’s so many resources out there that they can pick up, most subjects are widely available and extremely well-resourced, there’s stuff you can pick up from school, YouTube, the internet, etc., but you can’t say the same for entrepreneurship or financial literacy. If you’re ten or fifteen years old and you want to learn about entrepreneurship, then you can’t just reach out and grab a resource, it’s not as easy to do. That, for me, would be our vision: for that child or young person who wakes up one day, and goes, “You know what? I’ve got an idea for a business” or “I’ve been running a business but I need to find out how I can grow my team, learn about marketing, know whether I should pivot”, they would know where to go to, or there’d be a quick search they can make and they could pull the information they needed to carry on with their journey. Or even just the advice. Within the grown-up entrepreneurial community, there are places you can go to get advice. But if you’re a student, where would you go to get advice? The same ecosystem exists, and I think having that there available to them would be of huge value.

We would like to thank Julian Hall, CEO of Ultra Education, for giving up his time to speak to us.