I co-developed and ran the UK's largest enterprise sandwich-year programme for six years at Sheffield Hallam University, graduating 72 students across more than 28 degree courses. For four years before that, I managed a network of schools and colleges for the Peter Jones Enterprise Academy, running the Edexcel BTEC L2 and L3 in Enterprise and Entrepreneurship. And prior to that, I provided business support for learners in the flagship Enterprise Academy in Sheffield for three years.
The number of learners who leave with a successful business? 5%, at a push.
In my experience, educational institutions typically measure the success of enterprise education programmes by the number of businesses created. But this is a folly. Employability should be the focus, with self-development the purpose.
A business-created metric is the wrong one. Most business owners are not entrepreneurs. Being an entrepreneur is like eating glass - it's ridiculously tough, not everybody can do it, and it takes a certain type of person.
A business owner with no interest in maximising profit or scaling, and no mission, is not an entrepreneur. Yet most enterprise programmes think they can capture learners, mould them into the next success story, and repeat. They miss the obvious: enterprise education is about applying entrepreneurial thinking to develop the individual.
The timing makes the folly worse. The average age of an entrepreneur is 42. So measuring a programme of teenagers and undergraduates by how many start a business now is measuring for an outcome that, for most people, is decades away.
Tracking a participant after they leave is notoriously difficult because data drop-off is almost total once the programme ends. But 100% of participants can benefit from enterprise education, and programmes like these undoubtedly increase the likelihood that someone becomes a business owner or entrepreneur later, when the time is right for them.
Entrepreneurial thinking is for everybody. Running a business is not.