The Duke

One of Prince Philip’s greatest achievements and legacies will be The Duke of Edinburgh's Award.

At the request of Kurt Hahn, his educational mentor, HRH The Duke of Edinburgh first considered the idea of a national programme to support young people’s development in the autumn of 1954.

According to the DofE website: “His Royal Highness wanted to bridge the gap between leaving formal education at 15 and entering into National Service at 18, so that young men made the best use of their free time, found interests and acquired self-confidence and a sense of purpose that would support them into their future and help them to become well-rounded citizens.”

More than 4 million teenagers have participated in the scheme and over 140 countries and territories now offer DofE programmes. Just in the UK, last year 295,490 young people started a programme and a record 159,051 Awards were achieved.

While it’s very broad, the DofE Award is the sort of upstream intervention that we think will raise the confidence of young people so later in life they will have the confidence and broad skills to consider entrepreneurship. It’s a long-term investment, but one worth making.

My colleague Sam Dumitriu covers some of the more enterprise focused upstream interventions in the latest APPG for Entrepreneurs digest, which points people in the direction of the work of The Prince’s Trust’s Enterprise Challenge, which was founded by Prince Charles, and our friends at Ultra Education. Sam also cites some other great international examples in his report on Educating Future Founders, such as Teach a Man to Fish’s School Enterprise Challenge, ABE’s KidsMBA, and VIVITA. 

(As an aside, when writing his history of the RSA, our Head of Innovation Research interviewed Prince Philip. Here’s Anton’s great Twitter thread on what he learned about Prince Philip’s commitment to environmentalism and the convening power he was able to wield.)

Calling all Female Founders

The Female Founders Forum is back. Well, it never really went away, but we have now cemented our plans for the next 12 months. 

In partnership with Barclays, it’s going to be bigger and better than ever, and it kicks off on Wednesday for the first of four webinars. This one is focused on helping support your exporting ambitions and includes Cecile Reinaud, the founder of Seraphine, who recently sold her fashion label for ￡50m, and Virginie Charles-Dear, founder of ToucanBox, which ships over 150,000 packages of activities for children and toddlers every month to the UK, Europe, and the US. RSVP here.

Later in the year, we will host regional roundtables across the country, and we will release our annual data-backed policy report (check out previous reports here).

It would be great to see you on Wednesday (literally, I hope, as there will be time afterwards for virtual networking), and please forward this onto any female founders who you think would be interested in getting involved in our work. You can sign up to our quarterly Female Founder Forum focused newsletter here.