Tuesday 23 June 2009

Is money well spent on entrereneurship education

UK Government provides millions for entrepreneurship education to schools, Further education programmes and to Higher Education. And I mean millions.

Broadly these funds go to secondary schools to ensure 5 days worth of entrpreneurship education (but political correctness means we have to call it "enterprise education" - whatever that is)

Those who have not gone to University but into more vocational education (FE) get very patchy support - mostly based on regional efforts, while in teh Higher Education sector there are two main sources of funding - one for commercialisation and one for transferable skills. Both of these manifest themselves ultimatley into entrepreneurship courses and activities of one kind or another.

There is ofcourse no co-ordination with the result that there is much redundancy, poor quality and uninformed courses. And there is some excellent work being done as well.

The UK has the luxury of actually having so much provision that we can even ask and challenge with such questions - whereas many of its European neighbours have nothing (relatively). So two questions arise:

How do we make things sharper and more effective so every Pound spent is more wisely spent and two does it matter if there is some redundancy - because at least there is something, while the neighbours still struggle with acknowledging the need.

Is this a serious matter and what shoudl we do about it?

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