Report Calls for Better Entrepreneurship and Enterprise Education

A pro-SME MP business group says the country needs to radically reform its approach to supporting smaller firms - as this is the only way to guarantee real long-term prosperity.

The All-Party Parliamentary Group (APPG) for Microbusinesses says we will need to change the UK education system to get there, however.

The group’s issuing a study this week, An Education System Fit for an Entrepreneur, which claims to showcase both how SMEs drive economic growth and what would need to be done to the way we teach kids to foster more economic self-starters.

The MPs say they have looked at business-friendly best practice – from primary school through to retirement – from a range of global economies to see what might need to be introduced to UK Plc.  

Some of their key findings include:

• The government needs to establish a strategy for enterprise education that covers the whole of both education and working life for UK citizens
• each stage of education (primary, secondary etc.) needs to be looked at to see what can be done to sow the seeds of entrepreneurship
• such support needs to be available for work returners, e.g. working Mums
• teachers should be helped to be able to engage with the business community for the benefit of students
• an independent body should be set up to hothouse proposals for integrating work experience, education, mentoring and funding.

The APPG was founded in 2011 by Anne Marie Morris, Conservative MP for Newton Abbot in Devon.

“Enterprise education is crucially important if the growth agenda is to succeed. We need to create enquiring minds open to new ideas and able to spot opportunities. We also need to ensure education in entrepreneurship is available to all, not just those that make it to business school,” commented Morris. 

The report is sponsored by tech SME cloudBuy.

“Our aim is to make setting up and running a business as easy as possible and this report sets out how we can help encourage our entrepreneurs to build their businesses,” claimed Ronald Duncan, Chairman of cloudBuy. 

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