Independent Schools Guide 2023: Entrepreneurship programs are preparing students for the future of work

One key attribute of an entrepreneur is the ability to adapt. For the students at Strathcona Girls Grammar’s Tay Creggan Campus, adaptation is one of many explicit entrepreneurship skills that are taught every day.

An independent Baptist day school for girls in Canterbury, Strathcona has a stand-alone campus for Year 9 students in Hawthorn, dedicated to the year-long TC Envision program.

“COVID-19 forced us to be a lot more entrepreneurial ourselves,” says Karyn Murray, Head of the TC Envision program, which the school launched in 2019 and soon had to adapt.

Amid the global circumstances of 2020, a group of “really tech- focused” students built an online sales platform as their project. Strathcona was so impressed with the results that it now uses the platform each year to launch all student projects requiring an online marketplace.

“It’s basically our in-house Etsy,” Murray says.

The TC Envision program provides “authentic, real-world” learning. To that end, by making products available to actual consumers, “students learn very quickly that some ideas take off, and some don’t”.

Partnering with the League of Extraordinary Women for mentoring and using the Wade Institute for Entrepreneurship model when teaching, TC Envision takes students through all steps involved in bringing an idea – for a product, service or social enterprise – to market.

It’s proving to be a genuine launching pad, with the students behind the sales platform now in Year 12 and “still developing a marketplace for young entrepreneurs”, while a Strathcona graduate has launched an eco-business, Planet Angels – although she put that on hold while studying a bachelor of global business development in Switzerland.

Murray says the experience focuses on three Ps: pivot, punt and persevere. “It’s a good analogy for life lessons as well, as we’re training them to be critical thinkers.”

Critical thinking involves looking at all potential outcomes and considering, ‘What if it works?’

Haileybury’s Head of Innovation and Entrepreneurship, Damien Meunier, invited Daniel Flynn, a co-founder of social enterprise Thank You Water, to speak to Year 9 students about this idea in March.

Meunier explains that when Flynn saw a billion-dollar water industry worldwide, yet knew millions didn’t have access to clean water, he wondered how he could connect the problem with a solution.

“Everyone told him it wouldn’t work, and he would say to them, ‘But what if it works?’,” Meunier says.

Flynn’s keynote address was delivered at a ‘Day of Inspiration’ that brought Haileybury’s Year 9 students together as part of the Haileybury Incubator Project (HIP), an opt-in social justice program that is spread across the year and focuses on entrepreneurship, design-thinking, creativity and collaboration.

Haileybury’s main education pillars have always been academic excellence, social justice and an international outlook. In 2018, it added enterprise and entrepreneurship, so this year’s theme – ‘HIP for Good’ – ticks a second box.

Other speakers covered topics such as artificial intelligence (AI), inclusivity, body image and Indigenous understandings.

“[These are] various different issues that we think are relevant, or the kids have told us are relevant to them,” Meunier says. “Then it’s like a call to action: what are you going to do in this space that’s going to make an impact positively this year?”

Meunier says research now predicts the average 15-year-old today will have 17 different jobs over five careers in their lifetime. “The future of work is about problem-solving and knowing you can find a solution,” he says.

Teaching entrepreneurship, then, isn’t strictly about sending future business owners out into the world.

“We don’t expect them all to become entrepreneurs,” Meunier says. Instead, “we give them the process and the tools so they can have the positive mindset that they can make a difference”.

This article appeared in Domain’s 2023 Independent Schools Guide.