In line with a growing policy interest for entrepreneurship as a solution for economic growth and welfare, there is an interest for introducing entrepreneurship into all levels of the educational systems in European countries. All EU member states have agreed to integrate entrepreneurship into school curricula. To integrate entrepreneurship into the education systems is however a challenging process. Research concerning the lower levels of the education system expresses different aspects of problems concerning the process of translating entrepreneurship into primary and secondary schools’ practice. These aspects deal with the tensions that the concepts create due to the backpack of meanings from the business and economic sectors and problems to internalize entrepreneurship.

By taking a point of departure in the translation challenges the purpose of this paper is to analyze similarities and differences between the education systems in three countries, Estonia, Finland, and Sweden. The comparison is between policy documents and implementation of these documents as well as challenges concerning translating entrepreneurship from policy intentions to education practice in lower education.

The theoretical framework consists of translation theory in Scandinavian institutionalism and policy implementation theory. Translation in this paper means more than linguistic interpretations; it concern transformation – how something is transformed when transferred to new organisations and contexts. In the gap between the policy idea of entrepreneurship education, the distance between, in this case, the policy ideas and the school forms a space for translating, filling in and interpreting the ideas in various ways.

Entrepreneurship in the educational system is as slippery and confusing as the entrepreneurship concept itself.  ‘Entrepreneurship education’ is often used by politicians and researchers interchangeably with concepts like ‘enterprise education’, but there is a difference between the concpets. The primary focus of entrepreneurship education is on starting, growing and managing a business, whereas the primary focus of enterprise education is on the acquisition and development of personal skills, abilities and attributes that can be used in different contexts and throughout the life course. Enterprise education, also referred to as entrepreneurial learning, is by politicians stronger proposed for the lower levels of the education system and entrepreneurship education for the higher levels. According to this we use the notion entrepreneurship in school as a general concept and use the concept entrepreneurship education when referring to the business association, and the concept enterprise education when referring to the wider definition.

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