21st Century Entrepreneurs Erasmus Project

Project Title

21st Century Entrepreneurs

Project Key Action

This project related with these key action: Cooperation for innovation and the exchange of good practices

Project Action Type

This project related with this action type : School Exchange Partnerships

Project Call Year

This project’s Call Year is 2020

Project Topics

This project is related with these Project Topics: Enterprise, industry and SMEs (incl. entrepreneurship); ICT – new technologies – digital competences; Economic and financial affairs (incl. funding issues)

Project Summary

Education for Entrepreneurship can be seen as one of the contemporary themes of current school and out-of-school education and has also become one of the priority topics of the European Union’s education policy. According to the definition of the European Union, entrepreneurship is the ability of an individual to translate ideas into practice, which includes creativity, innovation, sense of initiative and risk-taking, as well as the ability to plan and manage projects with the aim of achieving certain results (The Council of the European Union). These crucial skills are teachable and must be integrated into educational subjects at all levels. We consider that this topic is of major importance in schools’ education and the teachers must develop the students entrepreneurial skills in order to become successful in their future careers.
The Project ‘21st Century Entrepreneurs’s main aim is to develop the students’ key competences within the frame of entrepreneurship. These key competencies are creativity, innovation and risk taking, as well as the ability to plan and manage projects. ability to identify available opportunities for personal, professional and/or business activities, and a broad understanding of the workings of the economy,
The activities that will lead to the achievement of these aims are job shadowing days, creative workshops, creation of sales sites, case studies of successful entrepreneurs, market days, business plans, traditional arts and crafts, bake sales, marketing strategies, pricing activities, branding, and advertisement activities. Entrepreneurship education is a creative process rather than a mechanical one. Therefore, teaching would be challenging and problematic and requires new and active teaching methods. The methodologies we used are the most effective, and include group project, case study, individual projects, writing business plans, practical experience in producing and selling products and services, learning from mistakes, development of a new venture creation project, and problem-solving, group discussion, official speech, interviewing entrepreneurs, simulations, and company visits.
In long term, the project aims to make students ready and equipped for the future labor market and contribute to the development of the economy. Moreover, this education, which takes children one step ahead of others in terms of creating opportunities, also helps to raise individuals who are sensitive to social equality, but also to help students lay the foundations of a strong self-confidence that they will carry with them for the rest of their lives.
The project is carried out by six partners from Portugal, Bulgaria, Lithuania, Poland, Turkey and Spain. Some of the partners are big groups of schools from urban areas (The Bulgarian school, Portuguese, Turkish, Lithuanian and Polish) and rural schools like the Spanish one. No matter what the profile of the schools is, the students are facing the same problems (lack of jobs due to the high unemployment rate, or the difficulty of finding a suitable job they can do) so to help them, we believe that entrepreneurial education should be a requirement in these schools. All the partners have a certain degree of experience in this field, but we felt that this theme was treated superficially, and, through the exchanged carried on in this project we aimed to reach the depths of this topic and learn new and innovative practices from each other. All the schools are planning to continue the entrepreneurial education by introducing this topic in the curriculum and by opening an extra-curricular Entrepreneurial school club dedicated to charitable actions.
The project involves a total number of 700 students (100 students with fewer opportunities), aged between 10 to 14 years old, and a number of 60 teachers. In addition to this number, many other teachers, school principals, psychologists, councilors, and institutions (such as NGOs, companies, city halls, higher education institutions) will work on the implementation of the activities. Parents are also directly involved in this project as they will participate in workshops or open days events organized in each school.
The project is based on six short-term exchanges of groups of pupils that include all of the most important elements of entrepreneurial education: basic principles of economy and European regulations of opening a business, marketing strategies, mix marketing, financial literacy and entrepreneurial key competences.
The Erasmus partners also worked an eTwinning project together, called ‘Be an Entrepreneur: Start today not (216086). eTwinning project was the space where the partners first introduced their schools and themselves and got to work with each other as a team. The project was used to create student’s background for our project. The eTwinning platform is also used for the dissemination of the project’s results and for the project management meetings.

EU Grant (Eur)

Funding of the project from EU: 171860 Eur

Project Coordinator

I.E.S SAN JUAN DEL CASTILLO & Country: ES

Project Partners

• Ozel Bahcesehir Ortaokulu
• Siauliai Dainai progymnasium
• Szkola Podstawowa nr 10 im. Adama Mickiewicza
• Purvo Osnovno Uchilishte “Sveti Kliment Ohridski”
• Agrupamento de Escolas de Pedome