The effectiveness of entrepreneurship education in South African high schools

Abstract

Youth unemployment continues to be a problem globally, South Africa included. Amongst the remedies for youth unemployment was entrepreneurship. Entrepreneurship is regarded as the key pillar to economic growth and job creation. Furthermore, entrepreneurship education is beheld as stimulating entrepreneurial activity, enabling people to identify opportunities and start new business ventures. The primary focus of the study was to assess the effectiveness of entrepreneurship education in the high school learners in the city of Tshwane. The study was quantitative in nature, and utilised judgemental purposive sampling method as an approach to select the sample. The sample consisted of 240 grade 12 learners with entrepreneurship education in the form of Economic Management Science (EMS) as part of their syllabus. This sample was selected from high schools in three townships in the City of Tshwane namely Mamelodi, Atteridgeville and Soshanguve. A structured close-ended questionnaire was used to collect data. The analysis of the data was done using descriptive and inferential statistics using SPSS software. According to the literature reviewed, knowledge and skills gained from entrepreneurship education programmes stimulate learners’ entrepreneurship intentions and challenge learners to establish new businesses. The factors that emerged from the finding of the study were entrepreneurship skills, entrepreneurship knowledge, experiential learning, theoretical education and exploration of entrepreneurship. The findings have proven that there is a relationship between theoretical education, and experiential learning with learners’ intention towards entrepreneurship. Furthermore, experiential learning was found to have a significant influence in developing entrepreneurship knowledge, entrepreneurship skills and entrepreneurship intention in learners. With these findings the objectives and hypothesis of the study were addressed. The recommendations made to address the objectives of the study include one for learners to interact with business people globally, one for policy makers to enforce compulsory entrepreneurship education at high school level, one for educators to make use of experimental learning for entrepreneurship education and one for future studies to investigate the influence of family business on learner entrepreneurship intention.