Global Summit of Entrepreneurial Educators in Swansea, June 2014

In June 2014, Leigh Sear presented at a Global Summit of Entrepreneurial Educators in Swansea, hosted by the University of Wales Trinity Saint David. He presented the five key issues that had emerged so far from a SFEDI run survey of enterprise and entrepreneurship educators in the UK. He shares them with the IOEE here:

1. There is a need to focus on the educator as well as the education.
Currently the focus tend to be about what's provided to the learners, like business plans, competitions, etc, but we also need to understand what the enterprise educator needs to do an effective job, such as skills, resources and networks.

2. There needs to be more innovation in assessing people's learning.
Is it really just written assignments and the business plan that can assess how students are progressing in enterprise? In practice there is more to life than the business plan. There's a desire to make things more innovative, like using video diaries and mind maps, but there can be a number of challenges in getting such assessment methods embedded in the education experience. These will be used by educators within certain disciplines in a school or college, such as arts, but it seems that there are a number of challenges in these methods in being adopted by enterprise educators in other disciplines such as business and management.

3. How can we get businesses more involved in the co-creation of the education experience?
Often a business owner will pop in for an hour, share their story, and then they leave again. It can be hugely inspiring, but it can also make students feel like it's an unattainable dream. Instead, how can we get business owners and entrepreneurs involved in the creation of the education experience, possibly working in collaboration with the students, so that longer-term relationship help students feel that business ownership can be a reality rather than a pipe dream.

4. We need to create learning environments that provide an 'experience'
… and then use theory to make sense of those experiences. A host of surveys have highlighted that enterprise education tends to be ‘education about enterprise’, i.e. understanding what it is about. The survey reinforces that there is a need for the promotion of learning environments which are tailored to enterprise education ‘for’, i.e. providing students with an opportunity to experience enterprise and develop the associated abilities and skills through doing.

5. There are competing expectations.
The survey highlights that enterprise educators are working across a range of different agendas which may not be complementary.  For example, the educator may be an entrepreneur who is teaching students, providing advice and mentoring to new business start-ups and looking after an incubation centre. These activities require different abilities and skills and one person may not have all these abilities and skills. So there is a need to recognise that there is more than one type of enterprise educator working in schools, colleges and universities and unpack how to use this difference to meet the competing expectations. 

If you're an enterprise educator, the survey is still live to gather input from take part in the survey here.

For a copy of the presentation or further details on the survey and other research activities in Enterprise Education, please contact Leigh Sear.