Over the last three decades in the UK, successive Conservative and Labour governments have implemented policies and initiatives aimed at widening access to higher education. During the same period, entrepreneurship education has emerged as an important aspect of higher education provision, as it has in other industrially developed and developing nations. The authors set out to conceptualize entrepreneurship education in the context of the rhetoric and reality of the present UK coalition government's ‘Big Society’ flagship initiative. This research builds on prior work on stakeholder impact on the provision of entrepreneurship education in UK HEIs. The results indicate that the inception and development of the Big Society has been remote, erratic and controversial. This appears to reflect both the attraction and the scepticism exhibited by various stakeholders, who tend to misinterpret the vagueness of the Big Society concept and apportion to it unrealistic ideological roots, expectations and possible outcomes. As a result, the Big Society rhetoric appears to have failed to alter radically the stakeholder balance of influence. The authors found no significant change in the perceptions or impact of various interest groups on the design, delivery and assessment of entrepreneurship education in UK HEIs. They suggest that the next few years are likely to prove crucial not only to the future of higher education in the UK but also to the growth and evolution of entrepreneurship education as well as the development of enterprising graduates. They call for further research to chart the direction, strength and overall impact of the Big Society, as it relates to changes in stakeholders' balance of influence on the development of entrepreneurship education.
Social class, ethnicity and access to higher education in the four countries of the UK: 1996–2010
