The paper explores the ways in which enterprise and entrepreneurial education (EEE), delivered by HEI's, impacts regional development. To do this we analysed several datasets from The Higher Education Statistics Agency (HESA) and the Office for National Statistics (ONS) focusing on the ways in which HEI start-up activity impacts indicators including GDP and employment. This highlights where further research and investment is needed to ensure a consistent regional development policy which we believe aligns with the conference's focus on connecting practitioners and policymakers to create a genuine change in regional disparities.
The following report summarises the actions to date and future planned activity with respect to a systematic literature review and an investigation of policy-related data and documents relating to enterprise and entrepreneurship education (EntEd) activity in UK Higher Education institutions (HEIs). The key findings are: 1. There is a lack of information and context, necessary for educators to make informed decisions about what works (or not), provided in published papers. Research to date focusses on short-term impact relating to awareness, knowledge, and entrepreneurial intent. 2. Analysis of Teaching Excellence Framework (TEF) submissions shows that the majority of institutions include EntEd-related activity in their submissions. Results narratives are more likely to highlight 'enterprise' related activity at higher levels of TEF award and where it is a sustained and strategic part of the university's educational offer. 3. Research and impact work relating to enterprise, entrepreneurship, or entrepreneurial education can provide a meaningful contribution to Research Excellence Framework (REF) results and therefore research funding. It can also have a significant impact on the communities it serves. 4. Returns to the Higher Education Business and Community Interaction (HE-BCI) survey show that the number of student and graduate new-start businesses per year was relatively constant for the four years analysed (2014/2015 to 2017/2018) at around 4,000 business each year with a mean average of 38.3 new-starts per returning institution in 2017/2018. Active companies reportedly employed an estimated mean average of 1.9 FTE employees, and had an average estimated turnover of £53,506. 5. 3 of the 10 highest ranking institutions for new-start businesses in 2017/2018 were specialist art, music, dance, or drama institutions. This increased to 6 of the top 10 when a proxy for the proposed new Knowledge Excellence Framework (KEF) metric for student entrepreneurship was applied. The KEF proxy used here was the number of HE-BCI reported new-start businesses by an institution by its total student population recorded for the same year of data collection. 6. The highest-ranking institution returned a number of new-starts to HE-BCI that equated to 12.7% of its total student FTE population in 2017/2018. Only 6 institutions (including the highest ranking) have a KEF proxy figure of over 2% of their total student FTE; 85 institutions report less than 0.5%. The results of the systematic literature review and the TEF, REF, HE-BCI and KEF proxy analysis have been used to inform questions to be used in a Delphi study exploring impact measurement, and will be taking forward into conference and journal submissions as appropriate.
