Why entrepreneurship education is the most important subject you can study at school

Across Australia, and in fact the world, debate has raged for several years about the types of skills and capacities our adolescents will need to make a positive contribution in the future.  Large organisations, including the OECD’S Programme for International Student Assessment (PISA), the Foundation for Young Australians (FYA) and the Melbourne Graduate School of Education (MGSE) have all gathered data which seek to find solutions to questions such as these. As new industries materialise and new technologies emerge further thought is put into the question of how schools are preparing students for the world beyond their classrooms. There is no doubt that we will need brilliant scientists, analytical mathematicians, erudite writers and sustainably minded geographers, but much of the literature now recognises that people will need new mindsets, they will need to develop the capacity to adapt quickly, to fail and to fail fast, being responsive to situations and applying data to new and novel situations. It is for this reason that I believe that entrepreneurship, if taught explicitly in schools, is the most important subject any student, but even more so females, can learn. Let me explain further.

To begin, a look into what the current data actually suggests. At present in Australia 34% of our companies are run by women in comparison to 66% run by men. [1] Not only is this a serious underrepresentation of one segment of the population, but alarmingly, in the last 20 years, the amount of female representation has only increased by 3%.[2] In 2020, US magazine ‘Fortune’ proudly gloated that “The number of women running America’s largest corporations has hit a new high” 37 of the companies on this year’s Fortune 500 are led by female CEOs.[3] This gender imbalance is disturbing to me as a female, a mother of a daughter and a teacher of girls. In Australia, it’s a similar story. In an article published in September last year by the Sydney Morning Herald titled ‘Absolutely no progress’: Number of female CEOs in Australia is declining’[4]  the figure of 10 women occupying the top job among ASX200 companies was given. As Sheryl Thai from The League of Extraordinary Women often says when speaking to our Year 9 students,  “you can’t be what you can’t see” and the lack of role models, pathways and embedded educational programs designed to enable women to fulfil leadership roles is disturbing. Entrepreneurial education provides students with transversal skills to negotiate and thrive in increasingly complex societies and must be seen as one specific approach to enable schools to address these gender issues and the lack of female activation in commercial enterprises.

“An entrepreneur is an owner or manager of a business enterprise who makes money through risk and initiative.” [5] Entrepreneurship in schools, when taught explicitly, is real-world learning. It is totally authentic, never contrived and seeks to encourage students to meet specific objectives.  “For learners to develop these skills or capabilities, the organisation of learning must provide students with the opportunities to truly exercise their capacities.”[6] This involves, adaptation, response to competition, meaningful application of statistics and data, feedback, negotiation and innovation. This is not a lemonade stand or a person baking a few cupcakes to sell, much as they can be enterprising in nature, this is a series of curated, intentional experiences designed to teach and give students opportunities to practise being curious and creative, forming a vision, taking a risk and being tenacious. Importantly, students need to understand that the skills and capacities they are learning are highly transferrable. Not all students will go on to run their own business post school, but they may be intrapreneurs or run teams and business units within larger companies where the same skills are crucial. In order for women to play a larger role in the upper echelons of business, they must first have the attributes to ensure that their journey can be a successful one.