How a new entrepreneurship course is helping Aiglon students shine

Parents hope that schools will equip their children with the knowledge, skills and critical thinking abilities needed to thrive in the real world. But all too often that isn’t the case. For example, in the UK, a recent survey found that over 70% of parents said the education system puts too little emphasis on preparing young people for work and 84% said it did not focus enough on life skills.

So how can educators better prepare students to not only do well academically, but also  flourish, professionally and personally, once they’ve graduated?

This is something Aiglon College teachers Jack George, Assistant Head, Discovery, Ann-Marie Thomson, Head of Enterprise, and Darren Wise, Director of IT, have thought about a lot. “For many years now, Mr Wise and I have spoken about how we think schools will need to pivot more towards inquiry-led, project-based learning, if they’re going to help students acquire the skills and competencies necessary for the future world of work,” Mr George says.

This year, with the introduction of a project-based course for Year 9 students focused on entrepreneurship and intrapreneurship, Mr George, Ms Thomson and Mr Wise are putting these thoughts into practice. The course — called Enterprise Fusion — covers many relevant business and startup-related concepts, and will see students develop their own product or service and follow the steps to bring their ideas to market. “It’s going to give students the chance to learn about business concepts like design thinking, market research, financial planning, prototyping, but then they’ll also apply what they’re learning as they work on their extended projects,” Mr Wise explains.

The course will also complement some of the work happening in other classes, such as computing, and allow students to deepen their knowledge by applying their learning in practical situations. “The course offers students the opportunity to gain technical skills in areas such as game design, web design, app design, rapid prototyping, 3D printing/making and CAD/CAM as they gain skills capable of creating their product,” says Mr Wise.

To kick things off, students on the course recently took part in a Start-Up Day — an opportunity for them to gain an overview of some of the concepts they’ll be learning about. “It was almost like a film trailer for the entire course,” Mr George says of the event. “They got to dip into loads of different things, so they have a basic idea of the story, but now, over the coming weeks and months, they’ll be going deeper, and getting into the nitty gritty.”

At the start of the event, students were asked to think about startup ideas for the home. They then got to workshop these with guidance from eight experts: four Aiglon alumni who have successfully set up and scaled their own businesses and four members of the Art Tech Foundation, a Swiss network of entrepreneurs. “It was fascinating to watch the entrepreneurs encouraging students to break down their big ideas and pushing them to think about the details, like how one tiny design flaw could lead to a much bigger failure,” says Ann-Marie Thomson. “At first, students were a little taken aback, with some feeling that their work was being criticised but they very quickly realised that, actually, the entrepreneurs really loved their ideas, they were just trying to get them to think about them more deeply.”

It’s these types of skills — identifying a problem, coming up with a solution for it, iterating, and then being able to implement it — that are so sought after in the world of work. And it’s these types of skills that Mr Wise thinks students will develop throughout the course. “So many courses involve students being led along a path, so their learning is very directed and dictated,” Mr Wise says. “Actually, when you give them a blank piece of paper and equip them with the right skills, they can find their own way.”

That approach complements Aiglon’s broader educational philosophy, Mr George believes. “Traditional education assumes linear progression; Aiglon is a development school, and we offer a bespoke way for students to write their own story.”

If the results from Start-Up Day are anything to go off, the students could write some very interesting stories by the end of this course. “Everyone at the event was amazed by what a group of 13-year olds managed to achieve in one day,” says Mr Wise. “They went from pretty much zero at the beginning of the day to having a finished presentation to showcase to the audience. Some of the entrepreneurs said what the students presented wasn’t too far off what they’ve seen in the real world, with real projects.”

It wasn’t just the entrepreneurs who left feeling optimistic about what the students might go on to achieve. “Start-Up Day was like a big, exciting adventure into the world of business, and it showed me how fun and cool it can be to come up with new ideas and make them happen,” says Yuina, one of the students who took part in the event. “It made me feel more confident, like I could really try starting my own business one day and maybe even make something awesome!”