The project context is the growing problem of youth unemployment across Europe. Although recently brought to crisis by the economic effects of the Covid-19 pandemic, youth unemployment is a long-standing problem linked to an education system that inculcates an outdated set of skills. Profound changes to the labour market caused by globalisation over the past three decades have prioritised a new set of skills - less to do with knowledge and hard skills and more to do with creative and critical thinking, digital innovation, and a mindset of flexibility and resilience. At present, young people are leaving education without these life skills and unprepared to deal with uncertainty and rapid change. The project is a programme of teacher development with new education materials and delivery models in the area of entrepreneurship education, where studies (such as Eurydice 2018) identify the need for new approaches. In particular it explores how the approaches of global learning can add value to entrepreneurship education, focusing on core skills of creativity, critical thinking, collaboration and citizenship to help young people develop the inventiveness and out-of-the-box thinking needed for successful social and economic enterprise. The project is led by Global Education Derby, a specialist educational charity that works with educators to develop global citizenship, and has project partners in the UK, Germany, Estonia, Turkey and Slovenia The group is made up of three secondary schools, and three organisations focused on teacher education and support. All have a common concern about the challenge their young people face in dealing with precarious employment. At the centre of the project is a core group of 8 practising teachers who, as part of completing advanced professional development, will develop and pilot a training package for Entrepreneurship Education teachers customised to their national setting, support those teachers in the implementation of real world student enterprise programmes, and document the process as a web-based resource. Around 60 teachers will be directly involved in these activities developing new skills to act as facilitator (as opposed to a lecturer), and use project-based approaches to develop the core skills of creative and critical thinking amongst their students. The web-based resource will provide guidance materials for teacher trainers and access to free online training for teachers as well as a supporting resource bank of case studies, lesson plans and curriculum ideas that will extend the project impact to reach many hundreds of additional teacher trainers, teachers and other education practitioners. In developing these new educational resources the project will work directly with young people from disadvantaged backgrounds. Some are children of recent migrants, others with special educational needs and disabilities, all underachieving academically and facing limited and precarious employment opportunities. In the longer term the project outputs are intended to help European teachers ensure their young people have appropriate skills and attitudes to make a successful transition from education to employment or self-employment.
To introduce the learner-centred approaches of global learning into Entrepreneurship Education to produce a more effective transitioning from education to employment or self-employment. Specifically: Partner schools in the project would develop new learning activities around social and economic enterprise to cater for the different needs of different sets of students, and their Entrepreneurship Education teachers would gain the confidence, skills, and access to teaching materials to bring new effectiveness to their work. Young people within partner and associated schools would develop the creative thinking skills to better engage with a wider range of career paths, opening up new opportunities for social and economic progress. The life skills they developed would help them in all spheres of life: from nurturing personal development, to actively participating in society, entering the job market as an employee or as a self-employed person, and starting up ventures (cultural, social or commercial). The project would broaden its impact by establishing a website giving teachers access to a range of training materials, case studies and other resources linking the themes of creativity, global learning, and entrepreneurship education.
The underlying need the project wanted to address was the growing problem of youth unemployment and increased precariousness of employment for young people across Europe. We wanted to explore how new educational approaches could help. Education to employability reports from across the political spectrum had highlighted a divergence between student skills and employer needs. Employers placed a much greater premium on the need for soft skills to sit alongside subject knowledge and it is these soft skills that students lack because few education systems are focused on giving students the opportunity to develop them. The Eurydice report “Entrepreneurship Education at School in Europe” 2018 suggested that teacher development was part of the problem. It identified a need for “active, learner-centred pedagogies and learning activities” and that “efforts could be made to improve the provision of CPD courses for Entrepreneurship Education in order to help teachers become familiar with the teaching approaches needed.....”