Summary

Europe needs more entrepreneurial citizens: creative, confident individuals who innovate to solve problems and convert ideas into value across enterprises, organizations and the public sector. Recent years have seen substantial growth in the number of VET institutions offering entrepreneurship education, but engagement levels are very low and programmes still focus on the how to run business aspects of entrepreneurship whereas entrepreneurship is now understood as a mind-set, a set of transversal competences of value to ALL individuals. The problem is that most of today’s cohort of teachers and trainers are unequipped to teach entrepreneurialism as a transversal skill across all subjects. In addition, the entrepreneurship support system is increasingly complex and those VET teachers/trainers whose students have promising start up ideas are often unsure how to cultivate this, or refer students for further support outside their own institution. The failure to widen and improve the scope of entrepreneurship education for young people in VET has immediate consequences, of import to all countries but especially those emerging from economic crisis, such as Spain and Ireland: it undermines the ambitions and employability of students, perpetuates youth unemployment, and limits opportunities for value creation for local and regional economic development.

The operational objectives of the project are:

– Develop a needs and opportunities analysis stating the case for an integrated, cross sector approach to student entrepreneurship education in the VET sectors.

– Create 5 Regional Alliances to bring together 60+ stakeholders from VET, private and public sector to state the need and opportunities for student entrepreneurship in their particular region, map existing hard/soft entrepreneurship supports, learn from emerging best practice and devise individual and collective Regional Action Plans.

– Develop and pilot test a multi-channel communication and capacity building campaign directed at 1500 VET teaching staff to provide them with the knowledge and skills needed to integrate aspects of entrepreneurship education into all subjects and disciplines.

– Jointly develop a Student Entrepreneurship Support Toolkit and pilot at least 10 innovative entrepreneurship support activities across 4 HEIs. (Eg.  Business plan competitions, one stop shop, mentoring, apprenticeship style entrepreneur training etc.)

– Widely disseminate project outputs and findings via a multilingual project website and comprehensive dissemination strategy.

Master project is delivered by seven organisations and  they include tertiary level Vocational training providers, social enterprises, non-government organisations, a private business and a local government body. The partners all share a commitment to widening and improving the scope of entrepreneurship education for young people.

Coordinator: Lisburn & Castlereagh City Council-LCCC (UK)

Contact Details: Padraic Murphy – padraic.murphy@lisburncastlereagh.gov.uk