Workload is arguably the biggest challenge teachers face, and may often act as a deterrent to arranging something out of the ordinary in a school.

But a charity says that when it comes to bringing business experts into UK classrooms, the time teachers spend organising speakers should amount to minutes, not hours.

Founders4Schools founder and chair Sherry Coutu - a serial entrepreneur and former CEO - told Tes Scotland it would typically take a teacher five hours of administration to arrange an industry “insight encounter”, from careers talks to “speed mentoring”, but that they could do it in just four minutes.

Organisations like hers can use automated technology to keep on inviting speakers until they get “the right number of yeses”, she said.

Thanks to a nudge from Scottish businessman Sir Tom Hunter, the charity, which started in England seven years ago, has arrived in Scotland. It tries to help pupils better understand the jobs they might hold or create in the future, by arranging speakers and meaningful work experience.

So far 200 Scottish teachers have signed up to Founders4Schools services, as well as many business leaders.

Ms Coutu said: “We are trying to make it so that every child in the classroom meets four people in a year - so at least one a term. That means they could potentially meet 40 role models before they are 16, all of whom run their own business. There can be no doubt these pupils will have a better idea of the options open to them after that.”

The charity’s arrival in Scotland comes, it would seem, at the right time. This month it emerged that targets for the Scottish government’s flagship scheme to prepare students for the world of work - Developing the Young Workforce (DYW) - were not being met.

A report by the Scottish Parliament’s Education and Skills Committee cites teachers’ workload as one reason for the lack of progress, and urges schools to free up more time to support young people preparing to move on.

It calls for a range of actions to ensure that recommendations from DYW are implemented by the government’s target date of 2021. This includes more time for one-to-one careers guidance, more opportunities for work experience, and more support for businesses seeking to engage with schools and provide apprenticeships.

However, according to Coutu, teachers understandably often do not know about the fast-growing companies in their own communities. The lives of educators, she said, did not necessarily overlap with the lives of entrepreneurs, and smaller companies could be “invisible”, with rural areas posing a particular problem.

“In many of these places you won’t find big companies, but there are plenty of little companies where people are eking out their own livelihood,” said Coutu. “Even [these companies] don’t necessarily realise they are running their own business or [are] entrepreneurs.

“Small and medium businesses are often invisible because they don’t have PR departments promoting them to the media.”

Coutu said businesses needed to “do their duty” by visiting schools and engaging with young people. Any business complaining about the skills gap in Stem (science, technology, engineering and maths) should immediately be challenged about how often they - and their employees - were going into schools and speaking to pupils, she added.