The development of the entrepreneurial capacity of European citizens and organisations has been one of the key policy objectives for the EU and Member States for many years. Fostering and developing these skills from primary school promotes an entrepreneurial mindset and creates a foundation of skills that support both entrepreneurship and employability.
“FA.N.T.A.S.I.A. – Entrepreneurship and soft skills through FAiry Tales: an iNnovaTive Approach to entrepreneurShip educatIon in primAry schools” is an innovative project tailored on the needs of early primary students, aged 6-9, and those of their teachers. The project aims at fostering the entrepreneurial mindset and knowledge of transversal and entrepreneurial skills of young students through an innovative software based on fairy tales.
The project is led by CREATE Partnership Trust, in cooperation with five primary schools from Italy (St. Thomas’s International School), Romania (Scoala Gimnaziala “Constantin Gh. Marinescu”), Turkey (Yahşihan Şehit Osman Yıldırım İlkokulu), Lithuania (Vilniaus Fabijoniškių gymnasium) and Portugal (Agrupamento de Escolas de Vilela), two entrepreneurial education experts from Academy of Entrepreneurship and Vsi “Psichologiniu ideju namai”, one ICT expert PONTO PR and one QA partner, ProMETEUS Association, thus ensuring a wide European impact and a deep integration of competences.
The project foresees the creation of three Intellectual Outputs.
The first is the FANTASIA Software (IO1). Under the guidance of expert partners, directly involved teachers will adapt their pupils’ favourite fairy tales and turn them into business-oriented stories: young pupils will, thus, have the chance to test and improve their entrepreneurial skills in their favourite heroes’ shoes. Before starting the research, teachers will attend a preliminary training in order to acquire the necessary competences and tools both at formal level, using the EntreComp framework, and a practical level.
Once the FANTASIA Software has been built, the second research step will be giving birth to IO2: a user manual with training modules to be uploaded on FANTASIA eLearning platform. The manual will help teachers interiorise the necessary skills to support pupils in acquiring awareness of entrepreneurial skills and develop them through the FANTASIA software.
Once both software and training contents are ready, it will be time to train “FANTASIA ambassadors”. For this, trained teachers from partner schools, together with trainers from the expert partners, will spread the message and train other non–directly involved teachers. This will multiply the impact of the project.
Finally, upon completion of the project’s pilot phase, an impact study of FANTASIA software use (IO3) will be launched. All products and learning outcomes of FANTASIA are highly sustainable and will produce long term benefits at EU level, given the breath of the partnership and the high transferability of the tangible outputs.
Ultimately, these are the chore characteristics of many European projects focused on entrepreneurship. Among them, EntreComp Europe explores how to introduce, develop and recognise entrepreneurial competences in a variety of domains throughout community building. One of its transferable and tangible outputs could be building communities of entrepreneurial schools.