"School Business Start": a unique program to develop entrepreneurial initiative among teenagers is launched in Tatarstan
In the upcoming academic year, Tatarstan is launching an unprecedented program to develop entrepreneurial skills among secondary school students. The organizers of the School Business Start project were the Ministry of Economy of the Republic of Tatarstan and the Ministry of Education and Science of the Republic of Tatarstan. 12 thousand schoolchildren from cities and regions of the republic will become participants of the program.
The project is aimed at identifying schoolchildren's interest in entrepreneurship and the formation of a new generation of business leaders, entrepreneurs and innovators. The program will help students expand their horizons about business.
“Our target audience is students in grades 5-7. These are guys who are just starting to grow up and are seriously thinking about which path to choose in life. We would like them to see that one of the ways is to own your own business. It is important for us to create a creative environment, conditions in which schoolchildren could try themselves as entrepreneurs and understand if they want to do it,” said First Deputy Minister of Economy of the Republic of Tatarstan Airat Shamsiev.
The uniqueness of the project lies in the fundamental methodological justification prepared by specialists from the Tatarstan Institute for the Development of Education. The new continuing education program will lay the foundation for entrepreneurship education in high schools. Until the end of September, teachers will master it. 200 teachers will take on the mission of teaching entrepreneurial skills to schoolchildren.
The learning process itself in the format of a business game will begin in October. In the classroom, students will draw up a portrait of an entrepreneur and pass special testing, as well as present their own projects, having previously prepared a business plan and developed a PR campaign. For this stage, 12,000 participants will be divided into groups of 60 people. In total, at this stage, from October to December, about 200 training events will be held in Kazan, cities and regions of the republic.
Schoolchildren who successfully cope with the business game will receive in-depth training in theoretical and practical business skills at the next stage of the project. These will be educational team workshops on creating school companies, at the end of which participants will present their projects to expert entrepreneurs. Students who pass this test will advance to the next level of the project. Before the New Year, they will take part in a charity school fair, and then a business case championship.
The final gathering of school business companies is scheduled for April 2023. It will be attended by 40 teams, in which 240 students will compete. All of them will have a unique experience.
“This is a project that carries an important social mission. Our educational system gives schoolchildren the necessary basic knowledge, but they do not always understand how to apply this knowledge in practice. We hope that the participants of the "School Business Start" will get an impulse to create projects, feel like builders of their own lives. And even if one of them does not become an entrepreneur, he or she will definitely gain valuable teamwork experience and learn to be responsible for their decisions. Schoolchildren will gain the skills of leaders, performers, learn to overcome communication difficulties, because everyone in the team is interconnected,” said Deputy Minister of Education and Science of the Republic of Tatarstan Alsu Asadullina.
The "School Business Start" program is implemented within the framework of the National Project "Small and Medium Enterprises and Support for Individual Entrepreneurial Initiatives".