Schools for Whizzkids

Spectator Business

September 2008

Edie G. Lush asks whether the skills of starting and running your own successful business can be taught in the classroom or only acquired through real-life experience

Playing the violin can be taught. Heart surgery can be taught. Entrepreneurship can be taught.

Doug Richard, serial entrepreneur and chairman of the Conservative Party Small Business Task Force

You can’t teach entrepreneurship in the traditional sense, but there is clear evidence it can be learned.

Baroness Shritti Vadera, Parliamentary Under-Secretary of State for Competitiveness

If entrepreneurship can’t be taught, or for that matter learned, someone needs to tell Doug Richard and Shriti Vadera. They may have slightly different messages, but they speak for different aspects of a movement to encourage entrepreneurship more widely in Britain.

However, if statistics are anything to go by, they’ve got some way to go. According to the Global Entrepreneurship Monitor’s 2007 report, the UK occupies an ‘intermediate’ position on most measures of entrepreneurial activity, lagging significantly behind the US as well as fast-growing economies such as Brazil, India and China.

Jonathan Kestenbaum, chief executive of the National Endowment for Science, Technology and the Arts cites the GEM study when he explains why some of NESTA’s current energy is focused on helping create the next generation of entrepreneurs. He quotes the American philosopher and education reformer John Dewey: ‘Entrepreneurial education is most influential when it is experienced in real life.’

Two of NESTA’s programmes are specifically designed to do just this. Space Unlimited (pictured above) takes 14 to 19 year-olds into organisations such as BT, BP, Glasgow City Council and the BBC – where they’re given real problems and asked to come up with solutions. Another programme, Rotherham Ready, brings pupils and students from primary-school age to 19 together with teachers and business professionals, providing work experience in business and workshops with entrepreneurs. ‘The whole success of this programme is because work-based learning is a huge benefit to students,’ says Kestenbaum. ‘It goes beyond apprenticeships by stimulating creativity.’

Also aimed at 14-19 year-olds, The Young Foundation’s Launchpad programme has a new initiative called Studio Schools. The idea of a studio school is centred on a series of real, operating businesses run by pupils. Launchpad is trying to address the challenge of kids who are disengaging from traditional forms of learning, as well as teaching what they see to be the ‘missing skills’ in the workforce. Simon Tucker, Head of Launchpad, is careful to point out that they aren’t trying to teach people only how to be entrepreneurs, rather they’re teaching ‘the key skills employers tell us they don’t find when they’re looking to hire people: how to take the initiative, measure risks, handle customer relations, work in a team and communicate effectively’. Having said that, he says, ‘These enterprising skills are also what are needed when you’re an entrepreneur.’

There’s a pilot school operating in Luton and according to Tucker, it ‘looks and feels like a cluster of businesses, with the young people acting as much as workers as students. If the students are over 16 years old, they’re getting paid for their work.’ The staff is a mix of teachers and non-teachers with business expertise. In addition to working in and running the businesses, the students participate in ‘enterprise projects’ such as providing consultancy for local businesses or starting up their own ventures.

It’s clear the efforts of the private sector are having an effect on the government’s plans for encouraging schools to incorporate entrepreneurship within traditional forms of education. According to Baroness Shriti Vadera, Parliamentary Under-Secretary of State for Competitiveness, the government has provided £55 million per year for three years – with three more to come – directly to secondary schools to help build their ‘enterprise programmes’. The point is for students to develop the same kind of ‘enterprising skills’ mentioned by Simon Tucker – managing and taking risks, working in teams and adopting a ‘can-do’ attitude. The result is that over 90 per cent of secondary schools now provide enterprise education for students aged 14 to 16 years old. Three years ago fewer than half did.

And according to Vadera, there’s evidence that these programmes are having some effect. ‘In the last five years, there is a 20 per cent increase in 16- to 24-year-olds who actually want to start a business’, she says. ‘By providing students with the skills to succeed as entrepreneurs they’ll create businesses that will survive longer, innovate more and employ more people. It goes to the heart of building the UK’s competitive strength.’

The government is also working with entrepreneur Peter Jones of Dragon’s Den fame to start a National Skills Academy for Enterprise which aims to ‘bring the boardroom into the classroom’. Again it will target 16- to 19-year-olds, and is specifically not aimed at those who are otherwise high achievers.

The idea that entrepreneurs can be people who might otherwise fall through the educational net due to lack of academic achievement is something that comes up again and again. Mark Prisk, the Conservative shadow spokesman for Enterprise, Deregulation and Competition, says he regularly walks into groups of entrepreneurs and asks them how many of them had trouble at school or had dyslexia. About a third raise their hand.

‘As a group, entrepreneurs are wired differently. That’s why the idea that educationalists can “teach” entrepreneurship is a mistake.’ Rather than teaching enterprising skills as the government is currently doing, Prisk advocates the approach the Norwegians take, where each school – primary and secondary – runs its own business.

But what about the rest of us? If we’re too old to benefit from any of these programmes and have a burning business idea that we’re certain will work, but haven’t a clue how to go about starting a business, is there any hope for us? Former Dragon’s Den dragon and entrepreneur Doug Richard runs a one-day ‘start-up bootcamp’ where, from 8a.m. to 7p.m., he’ll take you through the set of questions you’ll need to evaluate your business idea: Am I an entrepreneur? Will this idea work? Is there a good market for it? How will I make money from it? Do I have the right team around me? What do I do before I write a business plan? What pitfalls do I have to be aware of?

He’s run one so far, has six more scheduled, and says the course attracted an incredible cross section of individuals: ‘Disadvantaged people who were out of the system, women who were coming back to work after having children, university professors and students.’ As a trained lawyer, Richard uses the Socratic method he learned in law school to get his bootcamp attendees to answer the questions he’s posed for them.

And what about all of those entrepreneurs already out there who are already running their own businesses without having been taught how to succeed? Where did they learn their skills? Alex Macpherson, chief executive of Octopus Ventures, echoes Kestenbaum’s comment that there’s nothing like real-life experience to teach entrepreneurship. He helped to find hip baby-food maker Plum Baby featured in July/August Spectator Business a new chief executive after it had grown to a point where to continue with its successful expansion strategy, it needed a leader with a different skill set to those of its founder.

Rather than bring in someone with specific start-up experience, he suggested that Patrick Cairns, who had spent his career at Unilever, should be brought into the company. ‘The skills you need to start a business are different to those needed to grow a business once it’s past the initial phase. Management, motivation and “selling the dream” often belong to different kinds of people than those who have started the business from scratch.’

Of founder Susie Willis, Alex says: ‘She is 100 per cent an entrepreneur. By combining her vision and Patrick’s extensive experience in the food industry, the company has a very strong team in place. Would Patrick Cairns have started his own business at this point in his life? Probably not, but yes, he could have been an entrepreneur in his own right too.’

So whether it’s a question of learning how to start a business alongside the three Rs at school, or going back to school to learn it all when you’re older, or learning broader business skills through mentoring within the business you’ve already founded, there are programmes and solutions out there to help take Britain higher in the entrepreneurship league.

This was written for Spectator Business , which you can Download