Abstract:

In Estonia, entrepreneurship education plays a crucial role in the education system. The idea and importance of it derives from the Estonian Life-Long Learning strategy.

The aim of the EE strategy is to systematically implement entrepreneurial competencies at all levels and for all types of education.

There are three main principles that EE is based on:
1) EE must be taught systematically at all levels of the education system.
2) EE should be developed in collaboration with all relevant stakeholders: universities, entrepreneurs, educational, and governmental institutions.
3) it is important to create awareness about EE and benefits that it offers to the individual as well as to the society.

The Estonian national strategy foresees bringing schools, universities and businesses together in delivering the most efficient and effective education. We support contacts between businesses and schools in different ways by encouraging mentoring, company visits and entrepreneurs visiting lessons and telling their stories. Business people go to schools for mentoring student companies. Many of them have been doing e it already for years and the number of volunteers is growing very quickly. Students learn theory from their teachers and get business advice from their mentors who are also good role models.

Lessons learned from our practice in implementing entrepreneurship education in Estonia are as follows:
- Collaboration between all relevant stakeholders (researchers, teachers, schools, entrepreneurs, government institutions, politicians) is important to assure success in implementation but difficult and time-consuming to manage.
- Systematic implementation of EE at all levels of the education system is essential to achieve success in implementation (competence framework, progression models). This is important to build a common understanding about EE in the society (amongst parents, teachers, school leaders foremost) – what it is and why we need it. What and how we should teach to the students at different ages to support evolving of their entrepreneurial mindset. This is based on the fact that the ultimate goal of an education system is an improved wellbeing and it can come only from economic development, which cannot be based on anything other than strong, competitive enterprises (being competitive at the international level is especially important in the case of a small county as the internal market is very limited).
- Integration of EE in all subjects is a challenge, we should not leave it to teachers to find a solution, we should provide them with methodological tools and instruct them. We also need to assure that the school leaders and authorities at the local level support teachers, because this is a big change in teaching and we have seen that in order to gain support and trust, we must clarify the need for a change also to the leaders in the education system.
- Impact evaluation is a challenge, but it is very important in order to see the progress, identify success factors. This is also important for communication, for convincing and gaining trust from parents, educators, students, politicians, etc.

We would like to conduct 6 15-minute attractive presentations with an exciting workshop to share our experiences and results and to share tools to build systematic entrepreneurship education at all levels of education from kindergarten to higher education.

Keywords:

Systematic entrepreneurship education, successful entry into the economic and entrepreneurial environment, development of a child's entrepreneurial competencies.