In 2014, Lord Young highlighted the important link between SMEs’ management skills and solving the growth and productivity challenge in this country - he recommended the launch of the Small Business Charter. His vision was the creation of a powerful tool through the accreditation of business schools with the SBC mark of excellence.
This vision became reality earlier this year when the Chancellor announced the creation of the Help to Grow: Management Course to be delivered by SBC accredited business schools.
At its core, the Small Business Charter highlights and promotes the impact that business schools have at three levels: Educational Programmes that are relevant and strategically aligned with SMEs, collaboration within the Local Economy, and fostering Student Entrepreneurship. These three Dimensions are the core of enabling the potential and growth of the UK economy.
Today, 35 business schools hold the Small Business Charter accreditation. They are distributed around all regions of the UK. Each business school has unique strengths in its approach and innovative ways of fostering connections between the SME community and its students and faculty. Whilst each school brings unique forms of excellence and impact to its community, all Charter schools collectively multiply their impact through collaboration.
The recent Small Business Leadership Programme is testament to this. Launched in August 2020 and delivered by 20 accredited business schools, the programme spanning eight weeks, and free to participants, has benefited more than 2,700 SME senior managers. Participating businesses covered a broad spectrum of industries and regions. Feedback from participants is impressive:
88% felt there were ideas that they could try in their business.
95% identified key goals and started to put in place action planning to implement ideas from the programme into their business.
96% finished the programme with an understanding of what drives productivity improvements in SMEs and have considered what it means for their business.
The Small Business Leadership Programme was the precursor to the Help to Grow: Management Course. The new programme has been extended to 12 weeks and includes a mix of face-to-face and online learning, as well as 1-to-1 mentoring. Starting in June 2021, we are committed to delivering the programme to 30,000 small business leaders over the next three years. The programme will extend beyond England to offer high quality executive education to SMEs in Scotland, Wales and Northern Ireland.
I am confident that our current Charter holding schools will rise to the challenge of helping small businesses across the UK to recover and grow. However, our collective task is a call to action to all business schools. As we move towards our Economic Recovery Plan, the connection between business schools, their SME communities and entrepreneurship has never been more important.
The SBC accreditation is much more than a kitemark of excellence and strategic focus, it is a powerful tool to deliver impact and growth to our economy by helping unleash the potential of our SMEs.