EEUK Director’s Blog | February 2026

During my most recent GETM4 project research secondment, a brilliant professor made the statement, “context is everything”, which resonated with me well beyond the workshop discussion. The context of that conversation was meaningful in and of itself but has propelled my thinking across the many contexts we traverse in our careers and has helped me to organise some of the reflections I wish to share this month.

I’ll organise these as follows: first, I want to reflect on our temporal context in enterprise education in the UK, indicating some of the realities of our place in time. Secondly, I’ll turn to the global context of our work and reflect upon opportunities to engage with and learn from our global networks. Finally, I’ll highlight the potential for all of us to engage in and enhance our local contexts — including an update on my beloved northeast, our network and our plans to form a regional SIG (Special Interest Group) with EEUK.

1. Temporal Context: taking action in the eye of the storm

As we welcome the lunar new year and transition into the Year of the Fire Horse, we are told this year may bring illumination and movement — it is forward-looking, energetic, and instinct-driven towards new beginnings. I think there is plenty to take stock of — even hope for — here in enterprise education and in the wider FE and HE sector.  Taking action is something I think we enterprise educators are good at (probably one of our defining features) and considering the continuing ramifications of financial pressures in the sector right now, there is much we can channel from this forward-thinking energy.

Our temporal context is dynamic, complex and interwoven in shifting political and ecological – and now more than ever, emergent threats caused by mass digitisation in many parts of the world.  The polycrisis impacting us all has profound implications for enterprise education (see fellow Board member, Catherine Brentnall’s teams Special Issue Call for Papers around this!) and what we can do about this in our own practise is compelling.  Temporally our context is fraught with competing demands and polycrises and now, more than ever, I think, we need to collectivise and collaborate for survival.

For instance, one of the projects I have been working on recently with my brilliant colleague and co-author, Dr Aldo Valencia, is around the concept of ‘cyborg epistemology’ (Valencia & Mountford-Brown, 2025), as a response to- and departure from ‘cyber-epistemology’ that we are seeing too much of within our classrooms. Epistemology in simple terms, refers to how we know what we know.  Whilst ‘cyber-epistemology’ refers to the unproblematised ‘download’ of information curated by tech companies and their algorithms as ‘knowledge’; ‘cyborg’ as an alternative, refers to an intentional engagement with AI (creatively and critically) with tactile and multimodal learning practices that enhance reflection, criticality and imagination with futures literacy.  In this temporal context, in the digital age, it is not just about what we know but how we know what we know; and taking the time to engage in meta-cognition is crucial for enterprise education and entrepreneurial futures.

Thanks to the GETM4 project we participate in, we are generating and collecting significant international data to help us develop these ideas further, and importantly, develop tools to benefit us all as educators and lifelong learners.

2. Our Global Context: Learning from ‘Not-So-Obvious’

My director’s blogs seem to follow a pattern of reflecting on recent research trips with the GETM4 project — not intentional but perhaps telling of how profoundly these experiences shape my thinking! I am acutely aware that participating in international secondments is an utter privilege, particularly amidst the current pressures facing our sector. The context and pause for reflection these trips provoke is worth sharing — not as a gratuitous “look what I did”, but as a reminder that experiencing radically different contexts can help us better appreciate the privileges we so easily overlook, and that doing things differently makes a difference.

The GETM4 programme is based on staff exchange research secondments between nine different participating countries. It is a great example of how emphasising the power of social and cultural capital to gain contextual insights and ideas can have profound impacts. Our most recent secondment took place in Nairobi, Kenya. If anyone reading this has had the privilege of visiting, you may agree that the breadth of entrepreneurialism there is unmistakeable and substantial — in every direction. The sounds and the sights and energy of Nairobi and above all, its people, are vibrant and intoxicatingly friendly and positive; and whilst the hard-work, drive and hustle is palpable, so too is respect and coopetition.  Innovation is everywhere and we were lucky to be shown so many examples external to- and within Kenyatta University, of people doing incredibly entrepreneurial things, with sustainability and learning from nature and the natural environment being core themes.

I met passionate educators who were drawing on the experiences and challenges of local communities and creating rich, visceral learning experiences with the students they engaged.  I talked with educators about some of the challenges they experience with attention, engagement and access, with developing curriculum with key stakeholders.  Despite such differences in context – and the context is everything – we share so many similar types of challenges with bureaucracy and competing priorities in key stakeholders and authorities.

One of the key GETM4 work packages centres around “Respectful Translation”. Initially premised on the necessity to respectfully translate knowledge between the global north and south, this concept has since been updated to represent the valuing of insights from diverse contexts — particularly “not-so-obvious areas”. The principle is not only about ensuring proper credit and utilisation for all stakeholders involved in developing such insights; it is also a broader call to challenge stereotypes and to practise contextual understanding.

I think the key to getting better at practising contextual understanding is for us to get better at sharing and collaborating. We can strengthen awareness and knowledge from our global partnerships and find ways to enhance our ways of working and understanding the complexities of our worlds.

So, what about you, our EEUK network? We know there are various institutions doing great things in Europe and around the world – participating in various international consortium projects – we would love to hear from you! Too often, we are realising, there are great outputs/outcomes being produced in these projects and not enough noise and/or knowledge about them.

We are keen to not just praise and extend the work you’re already doing – we can also look at ways of working together in discrete projects as partners.  For instance, EEUK can participate in relevant consortiums for (UK/European) funded projects or help you to maximise the impact of your existing work of this nature. If you’re in interested in exploring this more, please contact: Steve@enterprise.ac.uk

I am also happy to share that I met up with the President of Enterprise Educators East Africa during this trip, and I hope to report back soon on how we might be able to work together and learn from each other soon.

 

3. Local Context: Building Communities – COPs and SIGs

In the northeast of England, we are quite lucky to have a strong and active regional network. Perhaps like some of you in the wider UK network, many of us have worked together at some point given limited regional mobility (often shaped by family ties and commitments) and have formed many point of connection and long-lasting friendships along the way. We have been meeting almost quarterly for a few years now, developing our own Community of Practice — inspired by a great enterprise exchange event at UCL several years ago — and taking turns to host at different universities across the network (Sunderland, Newcastle, Durham, and Northumbria so far, with potentially more to come!). So, the network grows, with newcomers – including academics and practitioners as well as what we at EEUK refer to as ‘Influencers’ but who occupy various types of (senior) management roles.  We may share some regional similarities, but we have different institutional drivers and priorities, different institutional ambitions and staff pressures, not to mention different responses to financial pressures on the sector.  In short, we always have much to learn from each other’s context and meeting regularly helps us to discuss and tackle some of the issues affecting us all.

Like many of you in the UK network, we are now working within a combined authority, and our new regional SIG will enable us to collectivise around specific regional issues and policy agendas. We are excited about what this might achieve, and warmly invite anyone interested in regional collaboration and forming your own SIG to get in touch with EEUK.

Full disclosure, I spent an uncomfortable amount of time trying to work with AI Tools to produce a UK Regional map, to include in this blog post.   I did not have success in developing anything that resembled accuracy unfortunately (we even lost the northwest to Ireland at once point!) so, for now, you just have a list to observe.   As we know, there are 4 constituent nations that make up our beloved United Kingdom and ONS tends to break down England into 9 distinct regions including:

1. Northeast

2. Northwest

3. Yorkshire and the Humber

4. East Midlands,

5. West midlands

6. East of England

7. Southeast

8. Southwest

9. Greater London

 

Groups within Scotland, Wales and Northern Ireland may also find value in differentiating regions (for example, west and east Scotland/north and south Wales) – there is nothing set in stone here – we are interested to understand what sort of ‘special interests’ each of our communities are concerned with and provoking space to tackle these and ride the waves of the storms ahead together.

Want to start a Regional SIG? Get in touch.

Closing Thoughts: Context is everything.

Context is a slippery notion that is often best articulated and understood through practice (Bate, 2014). As Goulder (1955) – who was apparently the first to coin the phrase ‘context is everything’ notes, ‘human action can be rendered meaningful only by relating it to the contexts in which it takes place’. However, too often we assume similarities and sameness from sharing the same ‘context’ — be that disciplinary, institutional, local, or regional.  The sheer complexity of contexts in this digital age demands that we remain thoughtful and recursive in how we read and respond to our environments.

Context helps us to understand not only where we are, but where we might be going. Whether we are navigating the temporal pressures of a sector in flux, drawing inspiration from entrepreneurial ecosystems far from home, or investing in the communities right on our doorstep, context shapes all of it. I hope these reflections offer something useful — whether as a prompt for your own thinking, a nudge to connect regionally, or simply a reminder that the spaces we occupy, however different, hold rich possibility.

Take action.

References

Bate, P. et al. (2014) Perspectives on context: a selection of essays considering the role of context in successful quality improvement. London: The Health Foundation.

Gouldner, A. (1955) Wildcat Strike: A Study in Worker–Management Relationships. London: Routledge.

Valencia, A., & Mountford-Brown, V. (2025) Rethinking cyber- and cyborg-knowledge for entrepreneurial futures and entrepreneurship education. Paper presented at the 48th Annual International Conference of the Institute for Small Business & Entrepreneurship (ISBE 2025), University of Glasgow & University of Strathclyde, Glasgow, United Kingdom

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Global Entrepreneurial Talent Management 4 (GETM4) is an international, interdisciplinary research and innovation staff exchange project funded by Horizon Europe’s Marie-Sklodowska-Actions, UKRI, the Polish Science and Higher Education Ministry and the Korean National Research Foundation.