Delhi Government Schools to have a subject on entrepreneurial skills for classes 9 to 12

Delhi Government Schools plan to introduce a subject on Entrepreneurial Skills to help develop the entrepreneurial culture among the young and enhance their technical and learning abilities. Delhi government plans to implement the Entrepreneurship Mindset Curriculum across 1022 government schools in the state. The programme is likely to be implemented for classes 9 to 12 from July 2019.

The pilot project of the curriculum designed by the State Council of Educational Research and Training
(SCERT) has begun in 24 government schools of Delhi and Sarvodaya Kanya Vidyalaya (SKV), East Vindo Nagar and Lakshmi Nagar, Government Girls Senior Secondary School (GGSSS), Yamuna Nagar, Rajkiya Pratibha Vikas Vidyalaya (RPVV), Civil Lines, Government Boys Senior Secondary School (GBSSS), Moti Bagh and many more.

Sunita Kaushik, Director SCERT, said, “Through this curriculum, we want to build confidence in our students so that they have the ability to excel in the professional world using their innovative ideas.
The programme will help them identify business opportunities, assessing resources for setting up a business and learning from the life of successful entrepreneurs in the classroom.”

Under this programme, around 7 lakh students will be trained on the basis of their basic foundation and entrepreneurship abilities. The curriculum will be divided into sections such as understanding market, bouncing back from failures, critical thinking, identifying opportunities, collaborations, bouncing back from failures, etc. This will help the students in identifying their goals. According to Yadhav, several teachers have also been trained to teach the students.

Speaking about the curriculum designed, Sapna Yadhav, project in charge, Entrepreneurship Mindset Curriculum, SCERT said, “The curriculum has been segmented focusing on identifying the students’ entrepreneurial aspirations.  For the pilot classes scheduled to be conducted for 40 minutes until May 10, we have trained around 43 officers and 478 teachers from government schools who are helping students to select and shape their career path as an entrepreneur.”

According to Yadhav, in the first week of the pilot project, introductory sessions were held to understand the abilities of the students. Through an interactive session, teachers asked the students to describe themselves through regularly used kitchen utensils. This helped in understanding the creative abilities of the students, Yadhav added.

Speaking about the curriculum, Yadhav said that the Entrepreneurship Mindset Facilitator Manual (EMF) provided for class 9 and 10 will focus on helping the students to understand their entrepreneurship abilities and train them on the various aspects of risk management during business operations. On the other hand, the students of class 11 and 12 will receive training on how they can identify different business opportunities and plan and execute their ideas in the corporate world. 

The project in its first week received 2000 online feedback from school teachers. According to officials, this will help the SCERT in building the final draft of the curriculum that was introduced by Education Minister Manish Sisodia in February 2019. The idea is to create an entrepreneurial mindset among students so that they become ‘employment creators’ not ‘employment seekers’