The Backpacker School: An empirical investigation of what it means to be an entrepreneurial school

Other conference contribution, 2026

What does it mean for a school to be entrepreneurial? While entrepreneurial education (EE) research has largely focused on classroom practices, less attention has been paid to institutional conditions across whole school organisations. This study investigates a large K–12 school organisation widely recognised for its entrepreneurial culture. Drawing on 451 written reflective dialogues with 100 employees using Designed Action Sampling, we inductively develop a seven-part framework describing key features of an entrepreneurial school: guiding ideas, view of humans, view of knowledge, and four cultures – workplace, leadership, education and development.

Findings show how entrepreneurial dimensions become institutionalised through shared vision, trustful relations, flexibility and distributed agency. Deductive analysis reveals that this entrepreneurial school organisation is grounded less in market-oriented logic and more in people-positive organising that mobilises fundamental human capacities – being passionate, positive, developmental, reflective, pragmatic, flexible, relational, resourceful and collaborative. The study also identifies a critical tension: strong entrepreneurial culture among employees does not automatically translate into strong entrepreneurial pedagogy for students. We conclude with implications through the lenses of Rosa’s resonance theory and Bremer’s people-positive organising, and outline contributions for research, policy and practice.