The Youth Start Entrepreneurial Challenges Project is the largest European policy experimentation project ever in entrepreneurship education. It promotes practical experiential learning programs at the compulsory school level by developing an innovate, transferable and scalable program through the collaboration of the high-level public authorities of Austria, Luxembourg, Portugal and Slovenia. The Program is designed to be flexible in its application and has intensive and extensive programs making it possible for teachers in all kinds of schools and from various disciplines to use Youth Start modules with their students. The program is oriented by a framework of entrepreneurial competencies and experiential learning theory and is aligned with Europe Entrepreneurship 2020 Action Plan. PEEP has the coordinator role of this European project that takes place from January 2015 to June 2018. In this policy experimentation project, we test the effects of an extensive and an intensive version of Youth Start – Entrepreneurial Challenges at 110 secondary schools and 78 primary schools in four countries. Since it is particularly important to test different moderators in order to inform policy makers in the most efficient way, we will test the programs in different types of schools (normal and intervention schools). In order to assess the effectiveness of the Youth Start Program we will apply a randomized controlled trial methodology utilizing a quasi-experimental protocol with an ex-ante, ex-post approach in three stages. The programs will also be tested at different grade levels. The primary target group is teenagers from 14-17 years old through three large-scale interventions. In addition, case studies will be implemented with children from 8-11 years old. These primary school case studies will incorporate classrooms that have only one teacher as well as those in the second cycle of primary school with more than one teacher.
Youth Start Entrepreneurial Challenges