Another week; another speech about innovation. Today Jeremy Hunt set out his “long-term vision to grow the economy” at Bloomberg. The Chancellor struck the right tone, but there was nothing particularly innovative about his speech. He may have dropped his four 'E' priorities: 'Enterprise, Education, Employment and Everywhere', but no new policies.

We have more than a few policies ready and waiting for him, his colleagues and his opposition, for that matter. On the education front, we had a report out this week with Young Enterprise on the value of Applied Learning – that is, the value of the education system simulating real-life contexts, with their relevance made obvious to young people.

Our Head of Innovation Research, and author of What Applied Learning Really Looks Like, Dr Anton Howes, makes the case in an article for CapX:

“We obviously want kids to be literate and numerate, and to have at least some knowledge of how the world works. And we often encourage them to demonstrate some capacity for analysing and evaluating arguments. But very often it can seem like our ambitions for schools have narrowed, with more and more effort going into teaching less and less.”

It's worth reading his article in full, but I'll take a bit of a step back to situate it in our canon of work on entrepreneurship and enterprise education.

Back in 2018, I wrote about enterprise education at universities. The main thrust of the report argued that enterprise/entrepreneurship education shouldn't be siloed in business schools. After all, many degrees taught outside business schools – for example, psychology, architecture or veterinary medicine – are likely to lead to self employment or starting a business. Universities should prepare them for this.

Our next report was Educating Future Founders, which made the case for teaching children as young as eleven the basics of running a business. It looked at the international evidence, citing a number of organisations already making a difference, including the Junior Achievement's Company Program, VIVITA and KidsMBA, that are doing just this.

Following this we published Future Founders: Understanding the Next Generation of Entrepreneurs, which was built around polling over 1,500 representatively selected British young people (aged 14-25). The headline finding was that over half of them have thought about starting (or already have started) a business. A further third (35%) say they have not thought about it but are open to the idea.

Crucially, respondents who have thought about starting or had started a company are more likely to have a family member or friend who is a business owner, while a surprising 57% of young people could not name a single entrepreneur who inspires them. The education system should be better supporting this growing demand.

More recently, we put together a report for the APPG for Entrepreneurship, which makes the case for properly integrating entrepreneurship in the curriculum. And in October we released Tomorrow's Entrepreneurs, which surveyed young entrepreneurs, and found, among other things, that the more money a business turns over, the more likely they are to agree that their primary aim was to tackle a social or environmental problem.

So what does this all add up to?

First and foremost, we aren't claiming that education should just be about teaching children to start businesses, or even just to be more entrepreneurial.

And yet, you don't need to read all our reports to know that our schools are missing a trick. As Anton argues, we aren't nurturing attributes like confidence, initiative, character, and more general attitudes to learning. Clearly doing this at scale through the education system is hugely complex, and as was mentioned at the launch, you need a strategy for different schools based on their capacities.

All this doesn't mean entrepreneurs shouldn't look to change things themselves – whether that's through Young Enterprise, or the many other organisations supporting enterprise education. As one of the young entrepreneurs who attended our launch event said, as well as all the skills that he has learned from the Company Programme, he also said something too many lose sight of in the education system – he said it was incredibly fun. I didn't do Young Enterprise and can count on my hand the number of times I had fun while learning at school. Maybe there's a lesson in that.

EX 23
We're teaming up with the Small Business Roundtable, Intuit, Enterprise Nation and the Federation of Small Businesses for a half-day symposium that aims to advance entrepreneurship on a transatlantic level.

EX23 will bring together small businesses, entrepreneurs and government leaders from the United States and the United Kingdom, and subject matter experts from across the globe for a discussion exploring entrepreneurship policy, industry trends, national and international economic development, the future of small business, international trade, and much else besides.

It will take place on Thursday, 16 March. I'll share more details of the coming weeks, but if you're particularly keen you can register now.