Jonathan Howell: A lesson in success from the business world

A*s, As, even B grades are the order of the day, but for those students who can’t achieve that for whatever reason – often simply that their minds don’t work in the way that enables them to hold two years’ worth of learned information and selectively regurgitate it on demand – then they are fairly certain to feel they have failed.

I know this because I am one of those “failures”. I sat my A-levels last summer, and I’m now trying again and striving for better grades this time round. I’ve never been much good at exams and so I’m pretty used to feeling this sense of – literally – not making the grade. But then last summer something happened to me that made me think differently.

Along with around 100 other sixth form and college students from across Yorkshire, I took part in a business and enterprise contest at Huddersfield Stadium called Umph! We listened to and talked with entrepreneurs like Jacob Hill, who is still in his early 20s but has started and runs a very successful camping supplies business for festival-goers called the Lazy Camper. Then we had a go at launching and managing our own virtual businesses using business simulation software.

The whole event was pretty much a revelation to me. The attitude of the entrepreneurs there, and the whole way they talked about their businesses, was incredibly inspiring and I could totally relate to what they were saying. It all seemed so real and to come at life from a different and more exciting perspective than the academic approach that I have been immersed in for so long.

To my complete amazement at the end of the Umph! competition I was given the “most enterprising individual” award, presented to me by the top boss of Grant Thornton accountants in Leeds.

It probably sounds like an exaggeration, but winning the award and the whole experience of taking part in the business contest felt like a life-changing experience for me.

Because of that competition and speaking to the entrepreneurs involved, I have a new-found confidence: the confidence to believe that I have potential, despite my stubborn inability to score the required high marks in exams. Since the Umph! contest, I have made a point of talking to business people whenever I get the opportunity. Several have commented that I have the right attitude and I know I am keen to learn.

A lack of academic success is, apparently, fairly common in entrepreneurs who go on to achieve big things in the world of business. Lord Sugar must be among most high-profile of these success stories, famously leaving school at 16 to start a business selling car aerials and electrical goods out of the back of a van he bought for £100.

But people who go on to succeed in any field despite an apparent inability to “do well” at school, by which, let’s remember, we specifically mean “do well at exams”, must be exceptionally tough individuals. They must be tough because they have succeeded despite being branded as failures by the very narrow academic structures in which we are all educated and we are all judged.

So for every Lord Sugar, who had the sheer chutzpah and inner confidence to turn round and metaphorically stick two fingers up to the system – “You think I’m a failure? Just watch me!” – there must be countless others who did not have that inner strength and did not realise an entrepreneurial potential because at most schools those kind of skills are barely even mentioned, let alone encouraged. Instead, these students give up, feel they have failed.

Things urgently need to change. Schools and colleges should be forging closer links with businesses so that students can learn about the whole raft of skills that they might have within them, that in the current academic system go unnoticed and uncelebrated. Entrepreneurialism, innovative thinking and the ability to think commercially are all essential to business, to the economy and to the future of our country.

Placing so much importance on academic exams, however, is a blinkered, antiquated and sure-fire route to failure for too many of us.

Jonathan Howell is an 18-year-old sixth form student from Doncaster.