This chapter seeks to highlight the role of partnerships in entrepreneurship education programmes to encourage the growth of entrepreneurial motivations in secondary schools. Educational institutions have the role of educating and preparing individuals to become employees 1. Self-employment or entrepreneurship has not been traditionally viewed as a career choice for graduates. Thus, this traditional role needs to be reformed because the world is changing.
The literature highlights the importance of promoting entrepreneurial skills among students 2. However, the overwhelming majority of curricular programmes do not contemplate contents related to entrepreneurship, teachers have no specific training in the subject and the formal educational system itself does not contribute to developing skills commonly associated with entrepreneurship. Nevertheless, schools, and particularly those in charge of them, are aware of the need to equip young people with these skills, and so they have embarked on partnerships with local and regional bodies in order to give their pupils the possibility of benefiting from Programmes of Education in Entrepreneurship.
The Verde Horizonte Group of Schools (AEVH) studied here is an example of a school organization which, to meet some needs for specific resources to activate those programmes, but contained in a collaborative strategy with local and regional actors, formed a set of partnerships with organizations that could add some unequivocal advantages regarding education in entrepreneurship. Those partnerships are based on the social network characterizing the region which is predominantly rural, depressed and remote from major centres, have an influential role in the school’s organization and are founded on leadership of a relational nature exercised by the head AEVH, recognized both internally and in the community.
Based on the evidence obtained, alignment of all partners was found towards a socially relevant objective valued by all those involved– successful integrated development and the educational success of the region’s children and young people.
This study was also able to conclude that the involvement of parents and guardians is not yet what would be wished for, according to the intentions expressed in the empirical evidence, and is not a true partnership regarding education in entrepreneurship. This fact arises from the study as the most obvious obstacle to the functioning of partnerships between the schools and community analysed, with a long way to go in relation to the influence and authority of this actor in the school context. Therefore, we believe that the Entrepreneurship Education Programme presents a viable model for fruitful inter-school collaboration and cooperation in entrepreneurship programming. The evidence so far indicates that it has been highly successful after only three years of operation. We suggest this model may be very useful to other regional groupings of entrepreneurship centres, as long as the geographical spread is not too great and the collaboration maintains its focus. We think the region will also reap the benefit of our efforts in the long run.
Several implications for policymakers and leaders of academic institutions follow on from the results presented here. There is a need to involve parents in defining a strategy of education in entrepreneurship. Entrepreneurship education should be included in the Educational Project of AEVH as an objective for the school, so that all the institution’s teachers (and other actors) identify with that objective, their efforts can be assessed within that parameter and entrepreneurship education projects are not abandoned by the institution when the teachers involved leave.
There is also the need to reward the teachers involved in the dynamics of EEP (for example, through assessing their performance). There may be a risk of abandoning the defined strategy for entrepreneurship education, if and when institutional leaders are replaced in their respective posts, since the partnerships formed are based essentially on the informal and even personal bonds existing between them. It is therefore necessary/advantageous to define nationally a strategy for entrepreneurship education in state schools.
Those in charge should implant the vision that entrepreneurship education is not the exclusive responsibility of the school and that the sphere of action can and should be occupied by other institutions in the community, for example, companies and business associations, whose technical knowledge is indispensable for the dynamics of entrepreneurship education.
Students involved in such courses and programmes could serve as inspiration and role models for new and prospective students, while at the same time strengthening the ties between a school and other parts of the society/community.
This study is not without its limitations. One of them lies in the fact it was not possible to obtain statements from representatives of all the organizations identified as forming part of AEVH’s relationships. This limitation prevented, for example, perception of the role represented by parents in defining the school curriculum. With parents being considered in the literature as an increasingly powerful pressure group, this is an unavoidable question in understanding the partnerships described. Inclusion of that actor is therefore suggested for analysis in future research, so that the data obtained are more wide-ranging, giving more depth to conclusions.
Another limitation of this study arises from the method used – study of a single case– which, despite being the most appropriate for this research, presents the disadvantage of not allowing generalization of conclusions. Data were analyzed for a single Group of Schools, in a specific context, and so generalization of the conclusions of this study to other cases is not possible, due to its specific characteristics, such as the social and business situation, cultural aspects, educational structure and geographical location, among other determinants of the type of relationships formed between School and Community.
As a future line of research, we suggest developing this investigation in a significant number of schools with triangulation of research methods, resorting to methods of a quantitative nature, so that a comparative analysis can be made with generalization of the results obtained.
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