COPIE2 has just launched a brand new website. From now on all updates on entrepreneurship education subgroup activities will be published here

Link: http://www.cop-ie.eu

Finland was chosen as a final destination as it has been consistently using ESF funds to finance entrepreneurship education projects. This report describes some ESF-funded entrepreneurship education projects and attempts to draw some conclussions that could help to inform future policy in other european countries.

Download report

“The Finland Phenomenon” is a 1-hour documentary highlighting the main success factors of the education system in Finland. A culture of trust, no inspection and examinations kept to a bare minimum together with highly skilled teaching staff are some of the ingredients of the mix.  Entrepreneurship is deemed key to equip students with 21st century skills.

“The European Commission and Member States have been working together since the 1990s to develop an entrepreneurial education and training agenda in Europe.Yet to date there had been no study on how guidance can encourage entrepreneurship and the cultivation of an entrepreneurial mindset.

This Cedefop study aims at better understanding how guidance can support entrepreneurship learning and contributes to the development of career management skills for entrepreneurs.

The aims of the study are:

1. to illustrate and assess the role of guidance in supporting entrepreneurship learning in initial vocational education and training (IVET) and higher education (HE);
2. to examine what kind of guidance is available for enterprise start ups for IVET and HE students;
3. to analyse what kind of guidance is available to develop the career management skills of aspiring and novice entrepreneurs.

The study covers the European Union (EU) countries, plus Iceland, Liechtenstein and Norway.”

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The Fresh Start project is a 24 month initiative co-funded by the European Commission, under the Directorate-General for Education and Culture.

The project aims to develop a specialized train-the-trainer course in order to provide European VET trainers with new skills that enable them to pass their training on developing young offenders’ entrepreneurial skills.

The main project objective is to adapt the available innovative content considering young offenders’ needs and specific sociocultural and linguistic contexts. Then, the project will develop a mentoring syllabus and a multilingual e-learning platform for VET trainers in order to improve their skills and competencies to train young offenders in entrepreneurial skills.

Fresh Start has been developed by a transnational consortium specifically set up for the purpose of implementing the project. It involves seven (7) partners from five (5) EU Member States i.e. Romania, Greece, Lithuania, Estonia and Portugal with complementary expertise.
Project website

The 2-day study visit programme

Day 1 (31 May). We will meet representatives of the Ministry of Education, Finnish National Board of Education and ESF Finland in order to analyse the role of entrepreneurship education in the Finnish Operational Programme and how the strategy is rolled out in collaboration with the Ministry of  Education.

Day 2 (1 June). We will have the opportunity to get a flavour of some interesting ESF-funded entrepreneurship education projects by project leaders.

Download Study Visit programme

Finland shows a sustained and committed support by the government and a good understanding of the need to engage a broad number of stakeholders in the development of a sound enterprise education policy.

Several enterprise education projects in all these areas are actually in operation with ESF funding. Current ESF Operational Programme allocates some €1.8 million for entrepreneurship education-related projects.

Learning from the finnish experience may help to open up new funding possibilities for entrepreneurship education projects within the framework of ESF 2014-2020 programming period in other Member States and regions.

In order to gain a deeper knowledge , COPIE2 entrepreneurship education subgroup is organizing a study visit to Finland on 31 May, 1 June.

Participants will learn about:

• How entrepreneurship education is supported by Finland’s ESF Operational Programme.
• Coordination method between ESF and the Ministry of Education
• Implementation and impact of ESF-funded entrepreneurship education projects.

Study visit programme will be made available soon. For any queries, contact us.

The High Level Symposium on “Entrepreneurship Education: Teacher Education as critical success factor”  took place in Budapest on 7th and 8th April.  The event gathered 80 experts from all over Europe and debates focused around 5 main challenges:

• How to help primary and  secondary teachers to become agents of change through initial teacher training
• Encouraging and enabling in-service teachers to engage in entrepreneurship education through Continuing Professional Development (CPD)
• How to develop teachers as coaches/facilitators of learning
• How to develop support systems for teachers
• How to develop the role of school and its community (their partners) to help teachers to provide learning opportunities in entrepreneurship.

Flash report of the High Level Symposium with preliminary conclussions is available for download at DG Enterprise website.

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Initiativkreis „Unternehmergeist in die Schulen“

(Committee of initiatives “Promoting entrepreneurial skills in schools”)

The committee has been initiated by the German Federal Ministry of Economics and Technology in 2007. At the moment it is formed by 11 initiatives who for years are actively engaged in this field. They meet for two working sessions in a year, present their activities at the “didacta” (The German fair on education and lifelong learning), organise information events and seminars.

The initiatives agree on their responsibility for the future of youth living in Germany. Young people should be prepared in an optimal way for their career and working life. Personal responsibility, self-competences, flexibility, entrepreneurial attitude and initiative are important competences everybody will need for his or her working life – not only to do an own business.

Therefore the member initiatives focus on:

• Working with teaching and learning methods fostering initiative and responsibility of students
• Providing information and support for teachers
• Establishing links between schools and economic sector
• Offering well-structured information on entrepreneurship initiatives in Germany as well as quality criteria.

Current members of the committee:

JUNIOR, business@school eine Initiative von The Boston Consulting Group, Jugend gründet, Deutscher Gründerpreis für Schüler, Schul/Banker, TheoPrax, Fachnetzwerk Schülerfirmen der Deutschen Kinder- und Jugendstiftung, NEBS, Ifex, Ideen machen Schule, Achievers International, NFTE.

Website (in German)

The Deutsche Kinder- und Jugendstiftung (German Children and Youth Foundation) is a founding member of the committee “Promoting entrepreneurial skills in schools”, coordinated by the German Federal Ministry of Economics and Technology.

Fostering Entrepreneurial Education is one of the main fields of activities of the German Children and Youth Foundation. We support this field since 1996 with a special focus on students’ companies. At the moment we coordinate a network of about 300 school companies at ALL school levels where approximately 2.400 young people are actively engaged. The geographical focus lies on Germany’s Eastern federal states (former GDR territory). Our pedagogical approach is to work with the young people as well as with teachers: we initiate the founding of school companies, support them continuously and offer trainings, workshops and networking activities.

Website (in German)

The Finnish National Board of  Education (FNBE)  is the funding authority for the “Driving Change through Entrepreneurship Education and Competence” development programme.  Finland is going at great lengths to strengthen the role of entrepreneurship education and to improve the competence of teaching staff in order to provide young people the skills and attitudes for coping with change and perceiving entrepreneurship as an attractive career option.

The FNBE grants support for ESF projects developing entrepreneurship education to the tune of  1 million  € annually. The ESF projects co-funded by the Finnish National Board of Education (FNBE) aim to:

• create  multi-stakeholders regional networks across schools boundaries.
• build learning pathways supporting entrepreneurship from pre-primary to higher education.
• develop entrepreneurial learning environments and teaching materials with a focus on action-based learning.
• promote teachers’ and headteachers’ competence in entrepreneurship education

In 2011 COPIE2 would like to gain a deeper insight  into the articulation of  this joint-approach between ESF and the Finnish National Board of Education which is perfectly aligned with one of the conclussions found in the EC report “Towards greater cooperation and coherence  in entrepreneursip Education” stating the need to provide more knowledge and support on how to access ESF funds to support entrepreneurship education projects.