From classroom to company.

My eldest daughter is eight. By the time she finishes Year 12, she will be entering an economy where the dominant skill is one most schools still do not teach. Not arithmetic. Not history. Not even coding, despite what every ‘think tank’ insists. The skill is older and harder to put on a curriculum sheet: the ability to find a problem worth solving and actually build something around it.

That skill is what we used to call enterprise. Today we file it under entrepreneurship and treat it as enrichment. An after-school program for the precocious kid with a side hustle. A once-a-term incursion run by a charity. It deserves better. The economy these students are walking into has already decided this is the discipline that compounds. The classroom has not caught up.

NAB’s 2025 research on Australian senior-school cohorts found that nearly half of them want to start their own business in their lifetime, up from one in three only two years earlier. The cultural posture has shifted faster than the curriculum has. A student in Year 10 today is more likely to admire Melanie Perkins than the dux of their school, and far more likely to be reading Naval Ravikant than Don Bradman. None of that is reflected in what they are being taught between nine and three.

I have spent a career on the operator’s side of the desk. Two decades across Adelaide, Shanghai, New York and Beijing. In finance. In venture studios. In fintech. In entertainment. In entrepreneurship education. The single thing I have learned about people who go on to build real ventures is that they all encountered the operator’s posture early. Someone, somewhere, gave them a problem to solve and a budget to solve it with. Senior school is, structurally, the right place for that encounter. The students have the brains, the social capacity for collaboration, the patience to sit with ambiguity, and the legal capacity to take some real risks. What they do not have, in most schools, is the structure.

There are two objections I hear most often. But we already do this. And: entrepreneurship can’t be taught. The first is wrong about what is being taught. The second is wrong about the nature of the skill.

What is currently being taught in Australian senior schools under the banner of business studies tends to be theory, framework and case-study. None of it bad. None of it sufficient. The student finishes with a vocabulary and a grade and a complete absence of operator experience. They have read about Schumpeter and answered a multiple-choice question about disruption. They have not built a venture, watched a customer reject it, rebuilt it, and pitched it to a panel that did not owe them politeness. The difference is not subtle.

And entrepreneurship is teachable in the same way music is teachable. You cannot will Beethoven into existence with a curriculum. But you can teach a child to play, well enough that the ones with the gift have somewhere to take it and the rest leave school musically literate. The same is true of venture building. The job of senior school is not to manufacture founders. It is to give every student structured operator experience, and let those with the gift find it.

Doing this properly requires three things that schools mostly do not have today, and that programs mostly do not take seriously enough.

A real curriculum. Not enrichment. Not a one-off. Not a half-semester scramble. Ten modules with the rigour of any other senior subject, assessed properly, delivered by staff who are trained to teach it, with deliverables a student can put in front of a real founder and defend. This is not pedagogically exotic. It is the operator’s discipline rendered into a syllabus, and it is overdue.

A network of working operators. The mentors who turn up should be people five to ten years deep in their craft, not the marquee names brought in once for a photograph. Marquee names have their place, briefly, to light a fire. But the venture is built between Module One and Module Ten by students sitting with people who recently sat where they sit. Founders. Designers. Lenders. Salespeople. Lawyers. Not theorists, not enrichment-circuit professionals.

A real pitch at the end of the road. The reason every Australian senior school takes the debating trophy seriously is that it ends in a competition. Make the venture program end in one too. An inter-school championship that the strongest ventures graduate to, with real prizes and a panel that does not owe anyone politeness. The work gets taken seriously when there is somewhere for it to go.

I have a personal stake in this. Two daughters. A program I am building with operators and educators in Adelaide. A view that this city should be the one that gets there first, because South Australia has the relative size, the proximity between schools and operators, and the civic ambition to make it happen. My daughters will go through some version of this in the next decade. So will the daughters and sons of the people reading this. The schools that move first will be the ones whose graduates carry it forward, and the ones whose graduates remember.

We taught our students to read. We taught them to write. We taught them to model the world in algebra and to argue in essays and to debate in front of strangers. We have not yet taught them to build. There is no good reason for that to continue.