Under the plan that was announced by the Chancellor Gordon Brown, the government wants to add summer schools for budding entrepreneurs to the requirement that children should receive five days a year of education that promotes entrepreneurialism.

Enterprise teaching in schools, which is backed with £60m of funding from the department of Education, was introduced to encourage young people to act on their business ideas. However, head teachers are concerned because they cannot see how they can fit the subject of entrepreneurialism into an already busy curriculum. They are also concerned about the lack entrepreneurial skills among teachers to adequately teach the subject.

How Do You Teach Students To Be Entrepreneurs?

Teaching students to be entrepreneurs in a traditional school setting that is more concerned about teaching to pass exams and working for an organization instead of working for yourself poses many challenges.

Heads, Teachers and Industry, an organization that builds business links with education, said many schools lacked the skills and knowledge to put the plan into action. HTI is launching a scheme for business people to be seconded for five days to help with enterprise programmers in schools.

Anne Evans, chief executive of HTI, said: "young people can be put off by business as they see it as boring but at the same time they think IPods are exciting. We need to demonstrate to young people that business is not just about figures but also the products and services they use everyday. It's about motivation rather than teaching them about profit and loss."

It is crystal clear that neither the government nor teachers have the slightest notion about what it takes to be an entrepreneur. For a start, let's forget the term entrepreneurialism because it's meaning is not helpful to the nuts and bolts of starting a business and successfully steering that business through the ups and downs of real life challenges where you learn to survive on a daily basis.

Learning to be an entrepreneur by reading books written by academics who have never been in business, who have never sold anything "door-to-door, nose-to-nose and toes-to-toes" is completely useless; a complete waste of time and good taxpayer's money.

So How Can You Teach Students To Be Take Risks And Be Entrepreneurs?

Learning from books written by entrepreneurs who have been successful at starting and running their own business can help as well being mentored by these same entrepreneurs. Encouraging and assisting entrepreneurs with their ideas can also help as this puts the onus of success on the budding entrepreneur. This is where the seeds of business ideas can germinate and with some watering, can develop into viable businesses.

Networking with other entrepreneurs is a MUST if you want to leverage your time and resource. This is an area that entrepreneurs cannot learn is the classroom. Yet, this area alone can make a massive difference to anyone in business, particularly small businesses.

Finally, we get down to the heart of what drives entrepreneurs and individuals wanting to be in business for themselves rather that opting for the safer less stressful option of working for a company in a paid job. What motivates some people to take risk and start their own business is a question that has different answers, depending on the entrepreneur you pose the question to.

If the government and schools want to really encourage young people to be entrepreneurs then they should first seek out entrepreneurs of all colours and backgrounds and get then to set the curriculum and provide the framework. That's what I would do if I wanted to foster entrepreneurialism among young British students.

What do you think?

David
Small Business Resource