EEUK Policy Review | 28 October 2026

The Chancellor’s Budget, a new Treasury entrepreneurship prospectus and three significant research reports have made this an unusually busy week for enterprise and entrepreneurship policy. Together they reveal growing entrepreneurial ambition, changing graduate career pathways and a renewed government focus on business creation and growth. They also raise important questions about whether the support available is sufficiently focused on developing the people behind the businesses.

A changing policy landscape for entrepreneurship

One of the more interesting moments in the Chancellor’s Budget statement was his explicit recognition of young people choices and challenges in his concluding statement.

“the young person desperate to start their first job or get on to start their own business”

It is a potentially significant expression of parity between employment and entrepreneurship as routes into economic participation, and one that resonates strongly with the work of Enterprise Educators UK (EEUK) and its members.

The Budget gives that recognition some practical substance. A new Young Entrepreneurs Allowance will be piloted in England, providing successful applicants with support towards their living costs during the first year of business. The Income Tax Trading Allowance will rise from £1,000 to £3,000 from April 2027, while new measures will support women-led scale-ups, expand the British Business Bank’s financial capacity by £5 billion and introduce preferential Capital Gains Tax treatment for qualifying founders of high-growth businesses. These announcements sit alongside the government’s wider commitment to youth employment, including its Jobs Guarantee and investment in local apprenticeship services.

The announcements are particularly timely because they coincide with three substantial research publications: the Global Entrepreneurship Monitor UK 2025/26, What do graduates do? 2026/27 and Starting Out and Starting Up, published by The Entrepreneurs Network and Sage. Alongside the Budget, HM Treasury has also published Entrepreneurship in the UK: Start. Scale. Stay., a prospectus setting out its approach to supporting innovative, high-growth companies.

Taken together, these publications reveal an increasingly important distinction between generating entrepreneurial activity and enabling sustainable entrepreneurial outcomes. They also provide an opportunity to consider the contribution of enterprise education, not simply as a precursor to starting a business, but as an essential component of effective entrepreneurship support throughout an individual’s development.

Entrepreneurial ambition is growing, but the ecosystem is under pressure

The latest Global Entrepreneurship Monitor UK report, Beyond the Unicorns: Everyday Ambition, Uneven Support, offers perhaps the clearest evidence of this tension. Total early-stage entrepreneurial activity increased from 12.0% of the UK adult population in 2024 to 16.8% in 2025, while activity among 18–24-year-olds reached a record 19.6%. The proportion of early-stage entrepreneurs expressing high-growth ambition has also more than doubled since 2022, reaching 35% in 2025.

However, this growing ambition is not matched by improvements in the environment within which entrepreneurs operate. GEM’s National Entrepreneurship Context Index declined from 5.0 in 2020 to 4.21 in 2025, with twelve of thirteen framework conditions deteriorating in the latest year. The assessment identifies particular weaknesses in entrepreneurial finance, government support programmes and education. Entrepreneurial education at school age remains the lowest-rated framework condition, while the assessment of post-school entrepreneurial education has also declined. An unsurprising outcome of the financial pressures in Higher Education.

GEM’s central argument is that the UK does not primarily have a problem with entrepreneurial appetite. Instead, attention must increasingly turn towards the structures that enable people to translate ambition into viable and sustainable enterprises. This includes support during the first years of trading, when access to customers, financial resources, networks and appropriate professional expertise can be decisive.

The report also challenges the tendency to frame entrepreneurship policy predominantly around exceptional growth businesses. While high-growth firms make an important contribution to productivity, innovation and employment, the wider population of entrepreneurs collectively sustains local economies and creates economic and social value. This includes independent businesses, sole traders, freelancers and entrepreneurs whose ambitions do not necessarily involve substantial expansion or external equity investment.

For enterprise educators, the distinction is important. Entrepreneurial capabilities are not valuable only to individuals pursuing high-growth businesses. They enable people to identify opportunities, deploy resources, exercise judgement and create value across a much wider range of professional, organisational and community settings. Effective policy must recognise both the economic significance of high-growth firms and the wider contribution of everyday entrepreneurship.

Enterprise education and the changing nature of graduate careers

The latest What do graduates do? 2026/27, published by Prospects in partnership with the Graduate Futures Institute, provides a complementary perspective through its analysis of graduate destinations. Although professional employment remains the dominant outcome, the report illustrates the diversity of pathways graduates pursue and the increasing importance of self-employment, freelancing and portfolio careers.

The proportion of graduates developing a creative or professional portfolio, freelancing, self-employed or running their own businesses increased from 6.8% among 2020/21 graduates to 9.0% among the 2023/24 cohort. The figure varies considerably by discipline, reaching 24.4% among creative arts graduates. These outcomes should not automatically be interpreted as evidence of entrepreneurial preference or success; portfolio careers and self-employment may arise through choice, the nature of particular professions or constraints within the labour market. Nevertheless, they demonstrate why enterprise education cannot reasonably be confined to students already expressing an ambition to launch a business.

The findings invite a broader discussion about how institutions prepare students for working lives that may involve movement between employment, independent practice, enterprise creation and further professional development. Careers guidance, employability provision and enterprise education all contribute to this preparation, but their relationship is not always sufficiently integrated.

EEUK believes that enterprise education should enjoy parity of esteem with employability, careers guidance and professional development. This is not an argument for steering more graduates towards self-employment regardless of their circumstances. Rather, it is about ensuring that entrepreneurial pathways are understood, appropriately supported and recognised alongside more conventional employment outcomes. Equally importantly, enterprise education develops capabilities that are valuable within employment itself: opportunity recognition, creativity, initiative, resourcefulness, critical thinking and the capacity to act effectively under uncertainty.

Such capabilities are increasingly relevant across professional disciplines, including those in which graduates may never establish a business. The challenge for institutions is therefore not simply to provide additional start-up activities, but to recognise enterprise education as an integral part of preparing students for complex and changing professional environments.

From youth unemployment to entrepreneurial opportunity

The report Starting Out and Starting Up: Making self-employment a route into work for young people, produced by The Entrepreneurs Network in partnership with Sage, examines the relationship between declining access to traditional employment and the opportunities presented by entrepreneurship.

Its analysis identifies a fall of approximately 129,200 employees aged 16–24 between 2022/23 and 2025/26, despite employment growth across the wider workforce. The self-employment rate among working young people increased from 4.5% to 5.4% over the same period, with approximately 193,000 young people now self-employed. Although the increase in self-employment does not compensate for the decline in employee jobs, it points towards an important and potentially under-recognised pathway into economic participation.

The report argues that government youth employment programmes have historically focused on helping individuals enter employment, while offering comparatively limited support to those seeking to create their own work. It therefore recommends a Startup Allowance pilot for under-25s, a £3,000 Youth Enterprise Grant for eligible young people beginning to trade and a youth-focused Help to Grow programme. Its recommendations are particularly relevant to the newly announced Young Entrepreneurs Allowance, although the Treasury has not yet provided sufficient detail to establish how closely the pilot will reflect the report’s proposed model.

The case for recognising entrepreneurship alongside employment is persuasive, but it requires some qualifications. Self-employment is not appropriate for everyone, and entrepreneurship programmes should not become a substitute for policies that improve access to secure and rewarding employment. Equally, increasing the number of young people who start businesses is not sufficient evidence of success if those individuals lack the capabilities or support to sustain their activity.

This is where the distinction between enterprise education and narrower forms of start-up support becomes particularly important. Supporting a business idea without developing the individual behind it risks creating dependency rather than sustainable entrepreneurial capability. A young person may receive financial assistance to launch a venture, but they must also be able to evaluate opportunities, understand customers, manage resources, assess risks and respond constructively when an initial proposition does not succeed.

These capabilities can be developed through purposeful enterprise education, including experiential learning, reflection and practical engagement with uncertainty. They are also transferable: even where a venture does not succeed, the individual should retain valuable capabilities that can be applied in subsequent employment, further enterprise activity or other contexts.

Finance, professional support and the critical early years

Access to finance is another consistent theme across the reports. GEM finds that young entrepreneurs frequently expect to rely on family support or personal resources, highlighting the potential disadvantage faced by individuals without financial security or established networks. The Budget’s Young Entrepreneurs Allowance appears directly relevant to this challenge, recognising that living costs may prevent capable individuals from pursuing entrepreneurial opportunities.

There is, however, a distinction between providing individuals with financial security and meeting the capital requirements of their businesses. For many aspiring student and graduate entrepreneurs, relatively modest amounts of finance — perhaps £500–£5,000 — may be sufficient to test a proposition, purchase equipment, develop a prototype or reach initial customers. Access to this type of microfinance can be inconsistent, particularly where university-based funding or philanthropic support is unavailable. The availability of finance should also be considered alongside its appropriateness: equity investment and substantial loans will not suit every venture, especially those pursuing modest or gradual growth.

The importance of continuity is equally significant. Students may have access to enterprise educators, institutional networks, facilities and funding while enrolled, only to encounter a substantial reduction in support after graduation. This transition can coincide with the period when entrepreneurs are attempting to validate their business models, establish reliable income and respond to the realities of trading. GEM’s emphasis on post-start-up survival suggests that policymakers should examine not only how many individuals receive initial support, but also what happens to them during the following one to three years. These support networks are key entrepreneurial infrastructure, often provided as an invisible benefit when universities are funded to deliver enterprise support.

A further consideration is the nature of the professional support provided. The Entrepreneurs Network places considerable emphasis on mentoring within its proposed Startup Allowance, but the term is increasingly used to describe a wide variety of interventions. Mentoring, coaching, training and specialist business advice are related but distinct approaches. Mentoring generally involves a developmental relationship informed by the mentor’s experience; coaching helps individuals develop their own understanding and solutions; training develops specific knowledge and skills; and business advice provides specialist guidance on specific challenges.

The distinction is not merely semantic. An entrepreneur struggling with cash-flow forecasting may need financial training or specialist advice, whereas someone reflecting on their entrepreneurial direction may benefit more from coaching or a mentoring relationship. Effective programme design requires an understanding of these different interventions, the professional competencies needed to deliver them and the circumstances in which each is appropriate.

This is a particularly important contribution that enterprise educators and professional development specialists can make to emerging entrepreneurship programmes. Rather than attaching generic mentoring provision to financial support, programmes should begin by understanding the educational and developmental needs of participants and designing appropriate interventions around them.

Start. Scale. Stay. — an ambitious strategy with a particular focus

The Treasury’s new prospectus, Entrepreneurship in the UK: Start. Scale. Stay, provides an important indication of the government’s wider policy direction. It identifies barriers facing innovative businesses, including access to customers, growth finance, specialist talent and regulatory support. Its proposals include greater use of public procurement to support innovation, increased British Business Bank investment capacity and a more coherent approach to assisting companies seeking to scale within the UK.

The prospectus is particularly relevant to higher education through its emphasis on research commercialisation and university-based innovation. It includes £25 million for UKRI Venture Doctorates, providing entrepreneurship-focused doctoral training, alongside up to £16 million in proof-of-concept funding to support prototyping, market validation and spinout development. It also describes £1 billion of investment in priority innovation clusters over four years, involving partnerships between universities, businesses, investors and local leaders.

These measures recognise the contribution universities make to innovation and the development of new businesses. They also demonstrate that entrepreneurial learning can form an important component of research commercialisation. However, the prospectus explicitly concentrates on innovative, high-growth firms, reflecting the government’s desire to retain more of the economic benefits generated by successful British companies.

This focus is understandable within an innovation and industrial strategy, but it is somewhat at odds with a comprehensive approach to enterprise education or more general entrepreneurship. Universities contribute to entrepreneurial ecosystems through much more than research spinouts. They develop entrepreneurial capabilities among students from every discipline, support graduate entrepreneurs and independent professionals, and build relationships with businesses, public services and communities.

The prospectus should therefore be considered alongside GEM’s broader evidence about everyday entrepreneurship and the findings of What do graduates do? about diverse graduate career pathways. Together, they suggest that policy needs to accommodate different types of entrepreneurial activity rather than assume that all ventures should follow the same growth trajectory.

Entrepreneurship beyond conventional business models

A further limitation of the emerging policy discussion is the relatively limited attention paid to social enterprise, co-operatives and mutual ownership. Although the Budget includes the appointment of a government Co-operatives and Mutuals Champion, these alternative organisational models are largely absent from the research reports and the Treasury’s accompanying entrepreneurship prospectus.

This matters because entrepreneurship is not defined solely by private business ownership or financial returns. Entrepreneurial activity can generate social, environmental and community value, and different ownership and governance models may offer appropriate ways to pursue those objectives. GEM’s findings on the importance of making a difference as an entrepreneurial motivation underline the need for a broader understanding of entrepreneurial ambition, although they do not directly measure social enterprise activity.

Enterprise education should enable individuals to understand and evaluate these different possibilities, including conventional businesses, social enterprises, co-operatives and other forms of collective ownership. The same entrepreneurial capabilities are also valuable within charities, public services and existing organisations seeking innovative responses to complex challenges.

If entrepreneurship is to contribute to inclusive and sustainable economic development, policy and educational provision must recognise the diversity of both entrepreneurial motivations and organisational models.

 

Devolution, regional ecosystems and future policy development

The Budget and accompanying prospectus also give greater attention to place-based economic development. The Treasury proposes increased financial and decision-making powers for mayoral strategic authorities in England, while the British Business Bank will work with devolved administrations and regional leaders on the next generation of Nations and Regions Investment Funds. The Bank also intends to strengthen local relationships through its Local Growth Team, helping businesses access appropriate forms of finance.

These developments have implications for how enterprise education connects with economic development policy. Universities, colleges and other education providers are already embedded within local entrepreneurial ecosystems, often helping individuals develop capabilities, access expertise, establish networks and connect with external support. Their contribution should be recognised when local and national programmes are being designed, rather than brought in solely to deliver predetermined activities.

The Young Entrepreneurs Allowance will initially be piloted in England, creating an opportunity for Wales, Scotland and Northern Ireland to consider whether comparable measures are appropriate within their own policy contexts. Additional funding available through devolved settlements does not automatically translate into equivalent entrepreneurship programmes, making engagement with devolved governments and relevant agencies particularly important.

There is also a longer-term opportunity. The Treasury prospectus anticipates further policy development through the government’s forthcoming 10-Year Plan, while the next generation of regional investment arrangements provides another potential point of engagement. EEUK and its members have an opportunity to contribute evidence about effective practice, the professional development of enterprise educators and the relationship between enterprise education, finance and entrepreneurial outcomes.

From recognition to effective support

This week’s publications and announcements suggest that entrepreneurship is gaining greater prominence within the UK’s economic policy agenda. The Budget recognises business creation as a route into work, the Treasury prospectus sets out substantial commitments to innovative companies, and the three research reports reveal both growing entrepreneurial activity and significant weaknesses in the support environment.

The challenge is to bring these agendas together. Financial support can make entrepreneurship more accessible, investment can enable businesses to expand, and specialist advice can help founders address immediate challenges. But none of these interventions should be regarded as a substitute for developing entrepreneurial capabilities.

For EEUK, three priorities emerge: enterprise education should have parity of esteem with employability and career development; entrepreneurship support should be underpinned by the development of the individual, not simply the progression of a business idea; and stronger connections are needed between education, early-stage finance, professional support and the first years of trading.

The next stage of policy development provides an opportunity to translate these principles into practice. As government designs the Young Entrepreneurs Allowance, develops its wider entrepreneurship strategy and works with regional and devolved partners, enterprise educators have relevant expertise and evidence to contribute.

The Chancellor’s recognition of young people starting businesses alongside those securing their first jobs is an important starting point. The challenge now is ensuring that parity of recognition is matched by parity of opportunity, education and support.

We would welcome the views of EEUK members: How effectively are entrepreneurial pathways recognised within your institution or organisation? Where are the most significant gaps in finance and post-start-up support? And how might enterprise educators contribute to the design of more effective national and regional entrepreneurship programmes?

Publications considered in this review

• Global Entrepreneurship Monitor UK 2025/26: Beyond the Unicorns — Everyday Ambition, Uneven Support.
• What do graduates do? 2026/27, Prospects Luminate and the Graduate Futures Institute.
• Starting Out and Starting Up: Making self-employment a route into work for young people, The Entrepreneurs Network and Sage.
• Entrepreneurship in the UK: Start. Scale. Stay., HM Treasury, October 2026.
• Budget 2026: Breathing Space for Today, Fresh Hope for the Future, HM Treasury, October 2026.