Technological advancements are rapidly transforming the job market, necessitating fresh approaches to prepare the next generation for future opportunities. Enterprise education can sit at the heart of ensuring young people have the skills necessary to flourish.
In Empowering the Future, written in partnership with Youth Business International, Philip Salter highlights some of the key policies we think are required to achieve this.
Attitudes towards entrepreneurship have shifted. Increasingly, young people see entrepreneurship as a way of changing the world instead of simply a way of making money. In Tomorrow’s Entrepreneurs, we surveyed young founders – finding, 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.
The report, published in partnership with Youth Business International, concludes with a series of recommendations on how to better support young entrepreneurs, including broader use of Challenge Prizes and Advanced Market Commitments for innovative solutions to big problems, and bringing back the Enterprise Allowance Scheme to help young entrepreneurs start their own businesses.
How can we equip young people with the skills to succeed in a fast-changing world of work? Entrepreneurship Education, a new paper by Finn Conway for the APPG for Entrepreneurship, explains the benefits of teaching young people how to start and grow a business. The report reveals that while young people have a huge desire to work for themselves, entrepreneurship education in schools is not integrated into the curriculum.
The report calls on the government to develop and publish a Youth Entrepreneurship Strategy for Schools, which would set out key skills it wants young people to develop, and to provide funding to encourage entrepreneurs from more representative backgrounds to visit and engage with schools.
Entrepreneurship education has traditionally taken place at universities, but there is strong evidence that earlier interventions can develop non-cognitive skills that are key to entrepreneurial success, such as creativity, persistence, and communication.
In Educating Future Founders, we recommend that governments invest in randomised control trials to gather evidence on interventions to boost entrepreneurship, and use the results to promote entrepreneurship education at a secondary level.
