Differences between further and higher education enterprise education in South Wales

Abstract

The objective of this paper is to understand from a comparative institutional perspective, the picture of enterprise education (EE) regionally in South Wales. The analysis compares age and entrepreneurial self-belief (also known as self-efficacy) and looks at the differences between further education (FE) and higher education (HE) of these elements. To explore this issue quantitative demographic and enterprise narrative data was collected through a third-party platform for supporting enterprise activity gathered over a period of 2 years across 7 institutions. The research interest in entrepreneurship education has grown significantly over the past decade. Much of this interest centres around the trends, challenges, and the pedagogical tools used to teach EE. Despite the contributions of these studies, research in EE remains fragmented and beset by problems of theoretical and methodological legitimacy. This study aims to defragment, in part, this area of study by applying a quantitative approach to analysing a significant sample (n=1093) featuring demographic and entrepreneurial self-efficacy data from a wide geographic region. This study adds a highly practical and reliable source of knowledge leading to valid conclusions. In conclusion, the study illustrates a huge age-range of prospective entrepreneurs and illustrates that digital platforms can be potentially used to engage more people over the age of 40 in entrepreneurial education. This paper also illustrates that entrepreneurial self-efficacy is markedly different between FE and HE perspectives. The learners in HE settings have much higher levels of self-belief in their ideas and how to action them than their FE counterparts.