Recognising the need for external validation and support, the EEUK Board has been delighted to welcome a wide range of reports and commentary in recent months.  By illuminating our work to a wider audience, such reports often serve to remind stakeholders of the challenges and triumphs of effective enterprise education as well as providing a spotlight on good practice and our inspiring students.  However, they also serve to challenge our approach, and recent reporting has prompted many Members to ask their teams probing questions to ensure that their delivery remains fit for purpose.

To assist your own reflection, we have pulled together some key questions to help explore your approach. (NB: these are provided again below together with the original source that drives this line of inquiry).

1. What are you doing from Day 1 to engage your students and interest your nascent entrepreneurs?
2. What are you doing with your students that benefits your local young people?
3. How effective is your use of role models / near-peers and female speakers in creating inspiration for all your students?
4. Are you building in “growth aspiration” into your business start-up workshops and support?
5. Metrics – are you doing enough to track and understand what works? Do you match opportunities between your student population and local economy?
6. Check your stats: What is it telling you that you can improve upon? Does your incubator reflect your student population? What is the gender balance at your workshops?
7. Are you looking in the wrong places for your nascent entrepreneurs? Or offering the type of support that doesn’t match your students who are most likely to start-up?
8. Are you focusing appropriately on your university core strengths/subjects as it matches with your city region?
9. Are you ‘doing it right’ for all your student population? When is your 24 Hack-a-thon, breakfast briefing or evening workshop excluding those most likely to start?
10. What opportunities are you missing out on? Are you capturing and evidence the wider impact you are having on the students you are working with?

And finally, when EEUK provided its viewpoint on the proposed KEF metrics, we felt that the student voice and co-creation was lacking.  Check out this funding opportunity to explore this in more detail:

The Office for Students and Research England are looking for project proposals that demonstrate the benefits to higher education students and graduates through their involvement in knowledge exchange activities.  Interested in funding projects that can provide evidence of the effectiveness and impact to the student, as well as the external partner, the call is open now and closes at 1700 on Friday 13 December 2019.

Repeat of questions with source details:

What are you doing from Day 1 to engage your students and interest your nascent entrepreneurs?
Source: build pathways from as young as possible ( APPG Micro Business Report 2014 and  Nesta’s ‘Opportunity Lost’ report which believes early exposure to innovation and innovative entrepreneurship matters. (taken from here.)

What are you doing with your students that benefits your local young people?

Source: Nesta (2019) echoes the European Commission’s Entrepreneurship 2020 Action Plan that calls for all young people to have the opportunity of at least one ‘hands-on’ experience of innovation and entrepreneurship during their time at school. Can you mobilise your students to assist, and build their own skills and competences at the same time?

How effective is your use of role models / near-peers and female speakers in creating inspiration for all your students? Source: Both the 2018 Future Founders report and the Government response to the Rose Review make clear recommendations for change – what are you doing in support of the ambition to inspire our young people and address the barriers to start-up for women?

Are you building in “growth aspiration” into your business start-up workshops and support?

Source: Nesta’s recent report ‘Motivations to Scale’ recognised that one of the issues recognised within female founders was the absence of a scaling mindset This is something that can be limiting our graduate starts or preventing students from acting on their ideas.
(Taken from here.

Metrics – are you doing enough to track and understand what works?
Do you match your student population and local economy?
Source: In his recent study on graduate entrepreneurs, the self-employed and micro-business, Dr Charlie Ball found that “over half of the self-employed work in jobs in the arts and media, particularly as photographers, artists, musicians, actors, authors, journalists, dancers and designers. Teaching jobs and roles in IT, sports and fitness are also important to the self-employed” (2019 p11)

Check your stats – what is it telling you that you can improve upon?
Does your incubator reflect your student population?
What is the gender balance at your workshops?

Source: Dr Charlie Ball’s https://luminate.prospects.ac.uk/graduates-in-self-employment-and-microbusinesse report states that despite there being a female majority among all graduates, self-employed and entrepreneurial graduates tend to be male (55%) p6

Are you looking in the wrong places for your nascent entrepreneurs? Or offering the type of support that doesn’t match your students who are most likely to start-up?
Source: Dr Charlie Ball’s report recognises that the entrepreneurial graduate tends to be older than the average graduate. His research found that 10% of new graduate proprietors and freelancers were over 40, whilst graduates going to work for microbusinesses were more likely to be young than the average and also to have worked for their client/employer before.  He states “this has strong implications for identifying and supporting student entrepreneurs and adds additional weight to the ideas behind student business and entrepreneurship societies and groups (Page 8)

Are you focusing appropriately on your university core strengths/subjects as it matches with your city region?

Source: Dr Charlie Ball’s report (2019) states that “universities wishing to support local economies will do well to work closely with entrepreneurial microbusinesses as well as developing student and graduate entrepreneur” (p12)

Are you ‘doing it right’ for all your student population? When is your 24 Hack-a-thon, breakfast briefing or evening workshop excluding those most likely to start?

Source: The Sutton Trust recognises that over the past decade more and more students are choosing to live at home during their studies, driven by the prospect of saving money, maintaining part time jobs and keeping family and social connections, however this impacts on the student experience and HEPI challenged you to make sure you are being inclusive for the commuting student

As the HEPI / Advance HE Student Academic Experience Survey highlights, commuting students can be less satisfied with their university experience so consider how you are can be more inclusive to more of your own students.

And what opportunities are you missing out on?
Are you capturing and evidence the wider impact you are having on the students you are working with? The recent Pearson Global Learner Survey indicates that confidence in educational institutions is wavering with many feeling that HE isn’t working for them, however they believe that “soft skills” will give them the edge (page 5). Are you tracking the skills and confidence built by the non-starts you work with?

Alison Price, Head of Policy, Enterprise Educators UK