Valnalon has pioneered the promotion of entrepreneurship in the education system in Asturias (Spain). It plays a brokering role bringing together decision-makers, practitioners, researchers and other social agents such as employers and third sector organisations. It has the remit to design and implement a coherent portfolio of enterprise education projects in primary, secondary and VET under the frame of Regional Action Plan for Entrepreneurship.

Why we are part of EntreAssess

In spite of all action taking place, the assessment of the key competence ‘sense of initiative and entrepreneurship’ at school/classroom level remains as challenging as ever. This was our main reason to join the EntreAssess project.

Current approaches to assessment of generic skills in Asturias

So we started by asking ourselves what is exactly going on inside and outside the classroom during a whole school year when it comes to assessment of the entrepreneurial key competence? Is there room for manoeuvre or do teachers feel ‘handcuffed’ by curricular and administrative constraints?  

A vital first step was to understand the minimum requirements that demarcate the playing field. All the curricular documents and guidance papers consulted highlight the need to develop, assess and report upon key competences or generic skills at both individual, school and system levels.  

Local Action Group

Next we joined forces with a group of 5 teachers (Primary, Secondary and VET levels represented). This Local Action Group meets on a monthly basis and has contributed to unveiling gaps and shortcomings in assessment process. The first output is a blueprint, a visual display enabling the documentation and alignment of front-end (classroom) and back-stage (out of classroom) interactions and touch points between key stakeholders (students, teachers, Heads, families).

In short, the assessment of EE competence in its current shape and form in Asturias schools can be defined as:

1. Jazzy… with lots of trumpet-blowing in written form but patchy and incoherent protocols (if any) in spite of endless discussions and a landslide of CPD opportunities on the assessment of key competences provided in the last decade.    
2. Eyeball-based… largely and mostly based on teacher observation and largely oblivious to other methods such as self- or team-assessments.
3. Post-mortem… or mostly summative, with teachers gathering together to report their observations on key competence development at the end of the school year relying almost exclusively on an impressive long-term memory to retrieve evidence for the progress made by each student during a whole academic year.

Findings and next steps

The picture that emerged was far from comforting, but the schools in our local action group are not sitting around waiting for things to change. Teachers are currently sharing some incipient measures adopted at school level as a reaction to shallow and patchy approaches to assessment currently in place. Pooling all these experiences together alongside those of our transnational partners’ may help us in transforming existing processes into a teacher-led, realistic and feasible approach to the assessment of EE competence in our schools.

Iván Diego Rodríguez, Coordinador Programa Educación Emprendedora, Valnalon

We have sent our second newsletter with an update on our work and last meeting. You can also read the story of our adventure in Iceland that involves the EntreAssess team rescuing a fellow teacher who was stranded in a snow drift for hours!

Read the newsletter (in English): http://eepurl.com/cIyYVj

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Europe needs its citizens to be entrepreneurial in all walks of life, to be able to cope with the changes that the XXI century is bringing about. Helping citizens grow their entrepreneurship competence is among the priorities of the European Commission in the area of skills development. The Entrepreneurship Competence framework (EntreComp) is one of the tangible outputs of the effort the Commission is devoting in this area. Developed by the JRC on behalf of DG Employment, Skills, Social affairs and Inclusion, the framework defines, describes and clarifies what the constituting elements of entrepreneurship as a competence are, as DigComp does for digital competence.

EntreComp adopts a broad definition of entrepreneurship, as the capacity to act upon opportunities and ideas and transform them into value for others, value that can be financial, cultural, or social. The framework breaks down this definition into 3 competence areas (Ideas and opportunities, Resources, Into Action), each being made up by 5 competences. An overview table shows at a glance how each competence develops at foundation, intermediate and advanced level. The full framework further describes a progression model with 8 levels of proficiency and establishes 442 reference learning outcomes. These state what the learners should be able to do per each competence depending on how proficient they are expected to be.

EntreComp has been designed as a reference framework – it is neither a curriculum, nor a programme and therefore it cannot be directly applied into educational practices. Public authorities, third sector organisations and private actors in Europe seeking to improve their guidance, education, training and mentoring services for young people and job seekers, to further an entrepreneurial mind-set among citizens can freely use it as reference to tailor their interventions to specific needs. Learning activities have to be designed to embed the 15 EntreComp competences, and if these need to be certified, assessment methods have to be selected.

Assessing somebody’s capacity to act upon opportunities and ideas and transform them into value for others is indeed a burning challenge. The JRC is working to design self-assessment tools for youngsters to reflect on their own entrepreneurial competence. Also, under the Erasmus+ programme, the Commission is funding an international cooperation action (this PEAT-EU project) to make advancements in assessing entrepreneurial learning. PEAT-EU brings together a pool of partners with extensive experience in entrepreneurship education and will work for two years to define what strategies, methods and tools can be used to assess learners’ progression in the development of entrepreneurship as a competence. PEAT-EU findings will help define how educators can select the most appropriate assessment strategy to cover the three competences areas described in the EntreComp, in primary, secondary and VET education. On this basis, guidelines can be developed on how to assess entrepreneurship as a competence. These in turn will be a driver for making entrepreneurial learning a reality in Education and Training systems across Europe.

Margherita Bacigalupo, Research Fellow at the Joint Research Centre of the European Commission

Our first newsletter went out following our Kick-Off meeting at the University of Wales Trinity Saint David in Swansea, Wales, UK in October 2016! You can catch up and read it here: http://eepurl.com/cpE605! We also have a translation into Spanish, which you can find here: http://eepurl.com/crwd8T.

The newsletter introduces the EntreAssess project and tells you what we did during our first meeting. Margherita Bacigalupo of the European Commission’s Joint Reasearch Centre also explains the EntreComp framework that is central to our project work.

Stay updated by signing up to our email list here for all future editions: here! 

EntreAssess, formally known as Practical Entrepreneurial Assessment Tool for Europe (PEAT-EU), is a Erasmus+ project under key action 2 – Cooperation for Innovation and the Exchange of Good Practices and especially the Strategic Partnerships in the field of Education, Training and Youth.

We are six partners in four countries – Iceland, Spain, Sweden and the UK – who develop practical assessment methods for entrepreneurship education (EE). Most of us have already worked on different European projects developing EE together before.

With this project, we want to gather knowledge and experience to develop a model of progression for assessment in entrepreneurship education across school levels. We believe that practical and easy-to-use assessment methods help to enhance students’ learning in EE and support the quality of education and outcomes in European contexts. Research shows us that teachers in EE have difficulties to identify entrepreneurial students and the Eurydice report (2016) acknowledges that assessment remains a challenge. That’s why we are collecting quality assessment methods – and they don’t just inform learners and teachers but also administrators, policy makers and society in general including parents and work-life.

Assessment in EE is a challenging area of work because it involves skills and real world connections that are not easily evaluated. Traditional assessment has been focussed on hard and measurable and comparable outcomes, at the expense of contextualised learning which is more suited for entrepreneurial education. Therefore teachers need support with their practice in EE in various ways – one important way is by having access to flexible, practical and academically-robust assessment tools!

The basic training and emphasis in EE promotes creativity and action (entrepreneurship). Through evaluation methods that are focused on competences, we can support learners to understand their own potential for creative thought and action, and teachers and facilitators can maximise their impact helping the learner progress.

EntreAssess will build on and develop results from earlier European projects and on the expertise of the partners. We draw, among other, on the work developed by the ASTEE project (Assessment Tools and Indicators for Entrepreneurship Education) and on the innovative work being carried out by the European Commission through the centralised development of EntreComp by DG Employment and the Commission’s Joint Research Centre. The focus of EntreAssess will be placed on a broad suite of practical assessment tools for classroom use.

The project runs from September 2016 to August 2018.

Svanborg R. Jonsdottir & Rebecca Weicht