Only just seen this.

I'm not being paid to do this - it's entirely voluntary. The only money I would make is a return on my shares, assuming I put the customary tenner in, and I doubt I'd make any life changing sums off a tenner, do you?

It's up to you whether any of you want to believe my reasons for doing this. I'm doing it because I know I enjoyed it when I was younger and my business makes its money from the local community, so it's only fair to put something back in. There are no commercial benefits - it's just something I'd like to do.

Oh that's ridiculous. Same goes for Prince Edward and it didn't do him any good with his Ardent Productions business did it?

Martha Lane Fox is another.

Even Stelios - he started easyJet with a £5m loan from his dad - this remains his only really successful venture. Stelmar - his first business - remains tiny by comparison to other similar businesses, and his other easy... branded businesses aren't great.

Just because you have money behind you, or you have an ancestor who was a successful business person, doesn't mean you will make a success of what you do.

I've seen many successful family businesses go under soon after a less able (or hard working) family member takes it over.

Similarly, I always remember the bloke who gave me my start in estate agency - he was the regional director of a large chain (he later became managing director) who landed that job after his own, smaller chain was bought out by the company I went to work for. He'd made loads of money both whilst owning the business and from its sale, but he remained down to earth and was a nice guy to work with. Basically, he worked hard and made his own money, so knew the value of what he had and the people who had been with him and effectively facilitated his success.

His son, however was a stuck up so-and-so who'd never known anything other than wealth. He was a director of that chain also and wouldn't give anyone the time of day unless they were female, under 30 and had big tits. He also became managing director following his dad's retirement and I hear that he was, shall we say, encouraged to leave following a period of poor performance.

In a nutshell - Senior was a hard working, intuitive, gracious businessman, whereas all Junior knew was his silver spoon.

I didn't say that being born into a wealthy family guaranteed you success - clearly James Dyson & Richard Branson have achieved something special and in both cases have overcome many failures too. I know a couple of self-made multi-millionaires whose kids have dropped out of university with no real goals other than to enjoy their trust fund, so totally agree that wealth can have the opposite effect.

But I would still ague that their respective schools probably didn't need to run something like Young Enterprise. Couple of my wife's relatives are currently at Eton and have the belief instilled into them that they will be running things soon - they already know socially people who are company CEOs, investment bankers, MPs etc (& the Lane-Foxes as it happens). They don't need to spend time running pretend businesses.

No, I'm not saying that, because both of those statements are ridiculous.

Young Enterprise gives teenagers a chance to see what it's like to run a real business and have a taste of looking after money, selling stuff, making decisions, working in a team etc and as cod'ead pointed out, to correct some of the misapprehensions that people might get by thinking that The Apprentice is anything like real life. So I think it's a valuable thing to be done by schools and people like Robinson who volunteer to help out are to be applauded.

Let us not forget though, that being very wealthy does allow for somewhat easier business start-up.
The risk may be the same in empirical numbers of £££ required but is vastly different in terms of the risk to your livelihood.

e.g. Prince Edward is still hugely rich.

Making a complete cobblers of Arbusto and CaterAir didn't do any good for George Walker Bush's future. Whatever happened to him?

Maybe not, but some people do. The same approach isn't suitable for absolutely everyone, is it?

Some of us aren't able to get jobs based on who we socialise with, so we need other options.

Absolutely. Stelios once said "The easiest way to make a few million is to have a million to start with."

I did it as part of my degree and found it to be a waste of time (primarily because I was in a group with a bunch of morons). I think the idea itself is a good one and the scheme seemed reasonably well structured given the nature of it. I think only good can come from the scheme personally.

The point of enterprise based education is not to teach people entrepreneurship (to even question whether it can be taught suggests a misunderstanding of how entrepreneurs (as opposed to business owner-managers) operate), but to promote it as a viable option and help people build practical skills and experience which will help them on their path.

My teacher was telling us the other day about someone last year who, for his Young Enterprise, enlisted his English class to work for him writing articles for newspapers which he had contacts with. He then sold his articles to the papers, undercutting most journalists. He made £20,000 that year, ended up hiring a PA to help him be organised for his final exams.