Learning to be Entrepreneurs

We recently had a debate in Parliament about Entrepreneurship. This was one of a number of debates that we now have which are not followed by a vote. Well and good as far as it goes. But in this case the Executive had not given the faintest hint that we would be talking about entrepreneurship in education.

So the first challenge for Parliamentarians was to re-write their speeches to adjust to what the minister was saying.

But it became clear as the debate progressed that school, college and university were unlikely places to learn to be an entrepreneur. Education is largely about acquiring skills and learning how to solve problems to which the solution is already known.

However one of the key attributes of the entrepreneur is to be blind to the impossible. Because one person's “impossible” is another's opportunity.

The world of business places a high value on efficiency. And efficiency means not re-inventing something already discovered. A student found copying another's work is rightly punished. But a businessperson who fails to use others' work is likely to fail in business.

But nonetheless Parliamentarians were in broad agreement that our education system has to undertake the essential preparation for the world of work.

One of the things worrying me significantly, because I am a mathematician to trade, is the dramatic fall in the number of maths teachers in our schools.

I was fortunate to have a charismatic teacher at my school. He was “Doc” Ingles.

In first year he took us around the school looking in dustbins, behind the blackboards, in store cupboards to see if we could find infinity. We concluded – and remembered – that we could not.

In senior school “Doc” brought in his annual tax return and we worked through it with him. Was the lesson that maths helped one with the Inland Revenue? Or was it that teachers, even the Deputy Rector like him, earned much less than they should. I still do not know, but I do remember the lessons taught.

The only other parliamentarian in Edinburgh who is also a mathematician is First Minister, Jack McConnell. In a previous life he was one of our increasingly scarce maths teachers.

But as research I have done shows, he presides over a government whose sums do not add up. Now that comment is not a classic piece of political knock about. It is a factual statement.

I spotted that the total in a parliamentary answer did not look right – and it wasn't.

I now have eighty one pages of answers with errors in them. Indeed in a single week in February there were eleven answers with totals of data. And I found seven errors in arithmetic.

But what has this to do with our debate on entrepreneurship? Well without the basic skills or reading, writing and 'rithmetic – and an ability to check and take care – businesspeople will have difficulty knowing if they their business is making money or losing it. Being able to add up is a fundamental skill.

This Labour Liberal government's sums do not add up.

That bodes ill for good governance and for the ability of our education system to turn out the next generation of successful entrepreneurs.

Tourism Troubles

April is when the old Area Tourist Boards are replaced by a central VisitScotland structure run from Edinburgh.

As I meet people who depend on tourists coming to our area, I meet worried people.

There had always been some concern that the previous Aberdeen-based organisation focussed too much on the city and on Deeside. We did not see enough visitors encouraged to visit our area in the rural north-east.

The current advertising campaign under the aegis of the new national body is well produced, contains the right messages about Scotland and will probably bring more weekend-break visitors to our country.

But it appears to think that our three airports are Glasgow, Edinburgh and Inverness. Where is Aberdeen? Nowhere!

So the early days are worrying.

But the very fact of the re-organisation is causing difficulty. Instead of looking out towards the potential visitors, too much effort is looking inwards about getting the organisation right.

Because the change-over has taken place before all the staff know where they will be working, before all the structures are in place, and on the eve of our peak tourist season.

The government has set the objective of increasing tourism in Scotland by half in ten years. But my questioning has failed to have them explain how we shall get there without an investment plan.

The industry does not want key questions to remain unanswered for much longer. Or we shall lose out to new states who recently joined the EU who are pitching hard for our tourists.