Business to get involved in entrepreneurship education? 

A conference entitled "Entrepreneurship education in Europe - fostering entrepreneurial mindsets through education and learning" took place in Oslo on 26-27 October 2006. The conference, jointly organised by the Commission and the Norwegian government, gathered relevant stakeholders to discuss the related policies and practices at all levels of education. 

Policymakers and representatives from different public departments, business associations, representatives from schools and universities, experts and researchers shared good practice and discussed, in a number of workshops, entrepreneurship in kindergarten, primary, secondary and higher education.

Each workshop elaborated concrete initiatives on how to put the recommendations of the recent Commission Communication into practice. Among the recommendations put forward are creation of a better platform of projects and teaching materials, better transfer of the processes of best practice projects and more public-private-partnership-projects. 

The conference also recommended embedding entrepreneurship within secondary school curricula but did not say whether this should be voluntary or mandatory. The role of teachers and educators and their appropriate training was highlighted as crucial at all levels of education.

The workshop on entrepreneurship in higher education recommended integration of entrepreneurs and professionals in curricula design and delivery and highlighted the need to clarify the outcomes we seek from higher education.

Johannes Weissmann from JADE, the European Confederation of Junior Enterprises said he is pleased that the Commission has recognised the importance of entrepreneurship education and now organised an international conference on the subject, but was disappointed to witness the absence in the conference of high level government representatives from the member states. "The Commission has understood the importance of entrepreneurship, but the government are not yet taking it seriously," he said. 

Weissmann also regretted the general focus of the conference on teaching entrepreneurship in a classroom. "JADE has hard time convincing academia that not everything need to be controlled and happen in a planned framework. One should just let people to do something, give them responsibilities and learn by doing," he told EurActiv welcoming the conference recommendation on involving more business people in the curricula design.

Stefania Popp from Junior Achievement - Young Enterprise Europe (JA-YE Europe) thinks one should concentrate on leveraging best practices of existing initiatives instead of designing some new programmes. "Many countries are already doing a lot in entrepreneurship education - Norway is a perfect example, the UK, Denmark and even some eastern European countries are also doing very well," she said. However, she thinks that integrating entrepreneurship in education curricula will be hard "as one lacks the appropriate human resources (teachers)".  

"The only way to deal with entrepreneurship education is to have more strong private-public partnerships," she added, regretting that only few private entities attended the Oslo conference.