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National Academic Adviser to X-Forces Enterprise - continues his reflection from last issue on enterprise and entrepreneurship in education...

My view is that effective enterprise and entrepreneurship education needs to improve in three areas. Firstly, it needs to find ways of engaging and retaining the engagement of young people from diverse backgrounds. Second, it needs to be more relevant and liberal in terms of what entrepreneurship is, enabling individuals and groups to discover and explore it within a context they can relate to and/or is important to them. Not everybody wants to be ‘the next big thing’ or be on The Times Rich List. Entrepreneurship needs to be achievable (as well as accessible) and we need to be cognisant of this when trying to promote entrepreneurship as an alternative career path or desirable outcome.

Finally, there is a need to ensure that our young people are equipped with the skills, knowledge and expertise they need to give them the tools and confidence to pursue entrepreneurship. For this to work, our measures of success and failure probably need to change. Finally, there is a need to ensure that our young people are equipped with the skills, knowledge and expertise they need to give them the tools and confidence to pursue entrepreneurship.

We all probably quote the well-known phrase of ‘failure being the first step on the ladder to success’ but as it currently stands the way in which policy makers, education and industry calibrate success means there is still work to do to normalise this and turn this into a valuable learning outcome. Policy makers could perhaps consider different ways of assessing educational outcomes which embrace creativity rather than conformity and entertain a wider range of performance measures which better align to the concept of entrepreneurship for all. At the same time industry and businesses need to work in partnership with educators to extol the virtues of pr enabling entrepreneurship so that it can continue to drive positive change and innovation to truly transform lives, business and society.and we need to be cognisant of this when trying to promote it as an alternative career path or desirable outcome Finally, there is a need to ensure that our young people are equipped with the skills, knowledge and expertise they need to give them the tools and confidence to pursue entrepreneurship.

It would be very easy to conclude that enterprise and entrepreneurship in education remains very much a work in progress. Despite this, I think it is still fair to say that education has made a good effort in delivering enterprise and entrepreneurship, learning lessons and evolving over time to try and ensure what is being delivered remains relevant and of value

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