Enterprise Education profile
keep minutes of meetings, produce accounts, pay corporation tax to Young Enterprise at the end of the year and show a balance sheet,” all of which, says Sproule, gives them “invaluable business skills.” While entrepreneurship plays a significant
extra-curricular role at schools such as Eton and Westonbirt, Brighton College has gone one step further in the quest to foster a new generation of entrepreneurs by becoming the first independent school in the UK to include entrepreneurship education formally in the curriculum. Its entrepreneurship programme combines lectures, master classes and a House Entrepreneurship Competition, in which Year 12 pupils are asked to create a business plan which they then present to judges on an official Entrepreneurship Day at the school. This year there were three winning ideas, all have been given the finance to com- mercialise, helped by entrepreneurial advisors from the local community. Harrison Perry, aged 18, whose house, Ryle, was a winner thanks to its idea for an antiseptic tourniquet, believes that by introducing more schemes such as this, future generations will become better problem solvers. He comments: “To stand up and pitch an idea you have come up with all by yourself is not like some class project where you just explain facts someone else discovered. I’m so
fed up with the way the school system is churn- ing out people who all know the same thing. People need to be given application [skills] and knowledge, not just knowledge.” Enterprise education needn’t
stop at entrepreneurship. At The Dragon School in Oxford, Daniel Gill has headed up an Entrepreneurship and Philanthropy programme for the last 15 years, which includes a number of projects and school trips aimed at encouraging entre- preneurial thinking alongside social awareness among school pupils. One project: The Governors Challenge, involves 140 Year 7 pupils, who are each given £2 and six weeks to grow that £2. Over the last three or four years, the return has been over £5,000, but, says Gill: “It’s not just about learning entrepreneurial skills – they need to know how to give the money away sensibly too.” Hence, at the end of the project, all the funds raised are put into a pot and the children elect the most ingenious project. That person can then make a bid for the pot on behalf of a good cause they think deserves support. “This generation is going to need to be innovative, enterprising, resource-
Showing pupils an
alternative to
ful and creative,” says Gill. “I think it’s essential that children leave school with some experience of enterprise, but we also want them to look beyond the profits at how beneficial whatever project they might grow in the future can be to their community and society at large.” That so many
accountancy and entrepreneurship
banking is a key part of encouraging
young Old Dragons (ODs) have recently set up social enter- prises is surely no co- incidence and speaks volumes about the impact such early educa- tion can have on young
people. As Tim Conibear, an OD and founder of The Isiqalo Foundation in
South Africa, has said: “It was through Danny Gill that I got to see first-hand the impact of the apartheid in South Africa, while on a rugby tour to South Africa in 1995.” Jamie Dear, another young OD, whose social
enterprise, OxFizz uses the skills of volunteers to provide educational services, adds: “The more entrepreneurs and social entrepreneurs all schools can help to forge – and the greater the so- cial awareness they can help to encourage – the better our evolving society will be shaped.”
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