More emphasis should be put on self-starting businesses

Exam preview: Business (tomorrow 9.30 am)Leaving Cert business should do more to encourage entrepreneurship, argues Brody Sweeny, founder of O'Brien's Sandwhich Bars

I am a very unacademic person and generally found school boring. Doing the Leaving Cert was like being in prison. One aspect of my education that I did enjoy, however, was drawing up business plans in business organisation, as the subject was called then.

I still use the skills I learned in Leaving Cert "bizorg" when drawing up business plans today. Another useful skill I learned was how to sell. The law of diminishing returns, a principle I learned in sixth year, has always stayed with me.

If I eat an ice cream and think it's delicious, I'll have another. The second will be even better. The third will not be quite as enjoyable and by the fourth I'll start to feel sick. Same person, same ice cream, different response. It's an important lesson in business. At this point, however, my admiration for Leaving Cert business ends.

A serious bugbear of mine is what I consider to be an enormous gap in Irish education - entrepreneurship.

Students are offered two options when they leave school - get a job or go to college. This entirely ignores the fact that there are 170,000 small business owners in Ireland. Many school-leavers will become self-employed; there is no preparation for this option in the formal curriculum.

While I agree that entrepreneurial skills are difficult to teach - you either have them or you haven't - many students do have a natural flair as self-starters and this is not fostered in the school environment.

We prepare people to be employees or students - they were the options a generation ago. Things have changed and there are many more opportunities. Students need to be made aware of these in order to take advantage of them. We need to sow a seed at that age. Those with the ability will run with it.

Schools should be places where students' minds are opened up to the possibilities that await them when they leave. The jobs-for-life mentality is a relic of the past.

People nowadays have to be more self sufficient, more creative about their careers. While entrepreneurship as a skill is hard to teach, it's very useful for students to be exposed to the possibilities of starting a business, a charity or other organisation.

Case studies, role models, tales of business success stories from the concept through the plan to the realisation, provide inspiration for students. They may not go straight from school into business ownership, but many will eventually have an idea and decide to take it further.

Many O'Brien's franchisees come to me after years of working for someone else when they should have been working for themselves. They have wasted the best years of their lives in an environment that didn't suit their talents. It's taken years for them to realise that this is where they wanted to be. It was never presented to them as an option in school.

Entrepreneurship is now an element of the transition-year programme, a welcome development. However, I think the ability to think for yourself should be considered right across schooling. Entrepreneurship needs to take its place alongside college and employment as an equal third option for school-leavers.

After school I went on to study business at college but I dropped out. The academic world didn't suit me. I always found school frustrating and demotivating. Many people I know who didn't perform well at school went on to make great successes of their careers. Plenty of students find the Leaving Cert cycle a prison sentence, like I did.

I'd just like to remind them that school performance is not necessarily an indicator of how your life will turn out. We need to generate different ideas of success in school. If you have street smarts, you'll carve out another route for yourself.

Brody Sweeney is a Fine Gael candidate in the next general election