Video · Teachers Media
STEM Career Role Models – Graham Gannon: Entrepreneur
Teaching about entrepreneurship in schools has grown substantially over the last decade, driven partly by careers-education requirements and partly by a broader conviction that pupils should learn to create as well as consume. Done well, it develops genuinely useful capabilities; done badly, it becomes uncritical worship of tech founders.
About this video
The Gatsby Benchmarks for good career guidance, adopted across UK schools, include encounters with employers and workplaces, and a growing number of schools use entrepreneurial projects — from Young Enterprise-style company schemes to shorter design-think workshops — to meet these benchmarks. The pedagogical case is that the skills involved (identifying problems, generating solutions, testing ideas, working iteratively, presenting persuasively) transfer well beyond commercial contexts.
The critical framing that's become more common is to distinguish entrepreneurial thinking from starting a business. Most pupils won't become founders, but almost all will benefit from the capabilities entrepreneurship develops: reading a real-world problem, proposing a solution, testing it against feedback, refining, communicating with a genuine audience. Framed this way, entrepreneurship education is preparation for creative work of any kind, not just commerce.
The failure modes are worth knowing. Uncritical valorisation of successful founders (usually male, usually American, usually wealthy) can put off pupils who don't see themselves in that image. Focusing on business plans and pitch decks can teach the surface conventions of entrepreneurship without the underlying capabilities. And ignoring the ethical dimensions — labour conditions, environmental impact, market power — teaches a shallow version of business thinking that most contemporary employers would recognise as inadequate.
Capabilities worth building
- Noticing problems. Not "what business could I start?" but "what is broken in the world around me, and why?"
- Generating multiple solutions. Divergent thinking before converging on one.
- Testing ideas cheaply. Getting feedback fast rather than perfecting a plan in isolation.
- Iterating on real feedback. Improving through cycles, not one grand launch.
- Communicating persuasively. Being able to make a case in speech and writing.
- Ethical framing. Considering who benefits, who bears the cost, and whether the trade-off is fair.
Discussion prompts
- How does your school's enterprise programme balance developing entrepreneurial capabilities against uncritical business-worship?
- What ethical questions do pupils encounter as part of your enterprise activities? Are those questions rigorous?
- Who models entrepreneurship to your pupils? Do the models reflect the diversity of who actually creates things in the modern economy?
Try this in your classroom
- For your next enterprise activity, start with pupils identifying a real problem in their community (school, neighbourhood, family life) rather than being handed a business scenario.
- Include a "who bears the cost?" step in any pitch or plan. Pupils must identify who might be disadvantaged by their proposed solution.
- Invite a local social entrepreneur (not just a commercial one) to speak with pupils about how they built their organisation.