ENTREPRENEURSHIP EDUCATION IN THE NATIONAL CURRICULUM FOR PRIMARY LEVEL IN BULGARIA

The aim of this paper is to explore how entrepreneurship education is addressed in the national curriculum for primary school in Bulgaria. It makes a comparative analysis of the legal and policy documents on education in force during the period from 2000 to 2015 and after the adoption of the Pre-school and School Education Act in 2015. The purpose of this analysis is to study the evolution of the concept of entrepreneurship education in Bulgarian education system and gain a better understanding of its theoretical grounding, objectives and learning outcomes as stipulated in the national general education curriculum and syllabuses. The analysis examines whether and how these documents address competences related to entrepreneurship and general economic knowledge. In order to avoid confusion and ensure terminological consistency, a brief overview of the wide and narrow understandings of entrepreneurship education is provided in the beginning. The documents included in the analysis are the laws on education and the regulations establishing the state educational requirements and standards on the curriculum and the educational content together with the enclosed syllabuses for subjects containing topics and concepts related to economics, entrepreneurship, financial literacy and professions for grades 1 to 4. The main subjects discussed are Technology and Entrepreneurship and its predecessor Domestic Lifestyle and Technologies. The educational standards and the syllabuses are analysed from the perspective of their objectives and the learning outcomes expected to be attained by the students at the end of the primary level, each of the grades and within the above topic areas. In addition, they are reviewed in order to verify whether the learning outcomes in terms of knowledge, skills and attitudes identified for each topic area are compatible to those in the standards and to what extent the progression between the grades is ensured. Special emphasis is given to the impact of the national lifelong learning strategies on the advancement of entrepreneurship education in the period under review. The findings of this analysis are used to substantiate the current curriculum framework for entrepreneurship education at primary level in Bulgaria. They also highlight the process of gradual integration of entrepreneurship within the area of technology education as a result of which a new compulsory subject Technologies and Entrepreneurship was introduced. Thus, entrepreneurship education has become part of the general curriculum in Bulgaria. Alongside with technological competences, the subject aims at developing the key competence of initiative and entrepreneurship. Based on the overall findings, conclusions are drawn regarding the theoretical foundations of entrepreneurship education as well as the factors which have influenced the process of its infusion into the Bulgarian education system.