One of the guests at this year’s Premier League Enterprise Challenge final was Steph McGovern, the BBC Breakfast business presenter and host of CBBC’s Pocket Money Pitch, and she was full of praise for the scheme and its participants.
The Enterprise Challenge, which was won this year by Manchester United’s Swinton High School, is run with Sport Relief and uses the appeal of football to encourage marginalised young people to get into business activities.
McGovern was impressed by the standard of the young people representing their clubs and pitching their business ideas and proposals to judges, as she explained to premierleague.com.
"I am forever amazed by how many young people now are so good at presenting. I see adults flounder in those situations and here they are so confident and they have thought so much about what they want to say, how they want to present themselves.
"They are so natural and it's lovely to see. Here they are talking to some of the biggest names in business and they are nailing it.
"I talk to far too many business people who tell me youngsters coming through today aren't work-ready and yet here I see loads of young people who are. They are really confident and ready to come up to me and tell me what they think about things.
"It is amazing what young people are capable of. We underestimate how good kids can be at stuff like this. I read the business plans and I was amazed by the level of detail in them.
"The teams have produced really simple ideas, with great thought and with a real sense of community. If you had said to them however many months ago that you are going to be presenting a business plan, doing profit and loss as well as other things, there would have been panic in their eyes but they should be really proud of themselves. They have achieved loads.
"These are the people who are going run this country and run the football clubs in the future. What they are learning now is absolutely crucial.
"That stuff you can't teach in the classroom and that's why this is so important. There’s not enough in the current curriculum which is about enterprise so being part of things like this is also pulling in kids who might not necessarily be academic but are really good business people.
"We are hearing about problems with the skills gap and not enough young people coming through school who are work ready and it's exactly this kind of extra-curricular activity that will make them good in business.
"So programmes such as the Enterprise Challenge are really important.
"Anything to do with enterprise and making it fun is brilliant for young people to get a bit of experience of what the working world is like."