A review of entrepreneurship programs and their underlying pedagogy in secondary education in the Netherlands

Despite the increase in the number of entrepreneurship initiatives and interventions, there is a poor understanding of the range of entrepreneurship programs in secondary education and their learning objectives.

This study provides insight into the current supply of entrepreneurship programs and their underlying pedagogy in secondary education in the Netherlands. To examine existing offerings and their underlying pedagogy, we used the 11 design principles of Baggen, Lans, and Gulikers (2021). Data were collected from three different sources for triangulation purposes - data from Vecon Business Schools (VBS) application forms, interviews with VBS schools, and documents and additional information (student ratings, learning goals, missions, and visions).

Our findings show that schools offer mostly causation-oriented and traditional entrepreneurship programs, in which there is little room for effectuation-oriented education. Also, due to the lack of a clearly stated mission, vision and learning goals of entrepreneurship education, schools pay little attention to the effect of entrepreneurship education on entrepreneurship skills/intentions.

However, we observe that schools acknowledge this and slowly design and offer entrepreneurship programs more consciously.