BY CHARLES ALDOUS
I was thirteen when the entrepreneur Phoebe Gormley (photographed) visited my prep school to discuss her career. Fresh from dropping out of university to focus on building her Savile Row tailoring business for women, she told a room full of blazered children and parents something our teachers would never say: think beyond academics. The staff smiled politely. We were meant to be inspired. Instead, the message was clear – good story, now toddle off to your senior schools after the summer holiday.
That speech day of 2017 perfectly encapsulates what British education does to entrepreneurial instinct. It smothers it under an avalanche of mark schemes and model answers.
Our schools teach research, reading, and teamwork admirably well. They do not, however, teach students how to brainstorm ideas, pivot when things fail, or develop the dealmaking and selling mentality that turns concepts into reality. These skills are needed more than ever in the AI workplace, and as young people often build some of the best businesses – Facebook, etc. They should learn these skills from a younger age.
Consider what GCSEs and A-levels reward. In maths, there is one correct answer and one taught method to reach it. In English, examiners expect specific textual references and standard interpretations. Even in supposedly creative subjects like DT, mark schemes dictate acceptable responses. Get it wrong and your marks drop; experiment too boldly and you risk missing the criteria entirely. The education system teaches students to think about what the examiner wants to see rather than what solution might work. This does not empower neurodiverse or creative individuals.
Senior schools’ grade fixations create risk-averse thinking at the exact age when young people should be experimenting freely. One failed exam can derail university or college applications; one term of poor performance requires explanation in personal statements and teacher reports. Small wonder that students learn to play it safe, memorise the approved answers, and avoid the messy, iterative process of genuine innovation. By the time they reach eighteen, we have produced a generation of young people who can write good essays (often aided with AI!) but they would not know how to negotiate an actual deal if their lives depended on it.
What makes a good entrepreneur? Not always perfect exam scores, but rather the ability to listen to customers, adapt when circumstances shift, and maintain dogged determination when rational voices say to quit. Richard Branson left Stowe School at sixteen with dyslexia and built Virgin through bold experimentation. John Bird spent time in prison before founding The Big Issue through street savviness and relentless persistence. François Pinault abandoned formal education at sixteen and constructed a luxury empire, Kering, through dealmaking instinct. None of these men would have flourished in our current system. The current system produces precious few like them, failing creative and neurodiverse minds.
The solution is not to abolish the current education system but to complement it with practical enterprise. What if Year 10 students spent one term not memorising facts but building a real business – a school repair shop, a peer tutoring service, coding LLMs, or a community cafe for the old? They would learn what no exam can teach: how to generate ideas under pressure, persuade sceptical customers, and pick themselves up after inevitable failures. Add pitch sessions where students present concepts, receive honest feedback, and iterate their proposals. Include negotiation workshops that teach confidence and dealmaking through role-play scenarios. Most crucially, assess students on their adaptation and resilience rather than their success rate.
This requires neither radical reform nor enormous funding. England could adapt its T-Levels framework for entrepreneurial development. The government could also reform business studies from a theoretical exercise in case study analysis into a hands-on qualification requiring actual enterprise projects. Like American universities, British universities could include applicants’ extracurricular activities in the admissions process alongside academics. The infrastructure exists, but we simply need the will to use it.
Until we teach secondary school students that failure is data and that there are multiple paths to success rather than one approved answer, we will continue producing excellent exam-takers and mediocre entrepreneurs. Phoebe Gormley understood this process in 2017, and she is thriving today after recently raising £3m to battle fashion’s sizing problem. It is about time British schools caught up.
Charles Aldous is a policy writer with Young Voices UK. He is reading for an MPhil in Economic and Social History at Cambridge University. A first-class graduate of Durham University, and aspiring entrepreneur, Charles has completed internships in the finance sector and served as the president of the Durham Union Society.