IntroductionEntrepreneurial competence has become a key competence for addressing the social, economic, and educational challenges of the 21st century. Despite the growing recognition of teachers as central agents in entrepreneurship education, available instruments have primarily focused on entrepreneurial behaviour or related constructs, while validated measures specifically designed to assess entrepreneurial competence among primary education teachers remain limited. This study aimed to develop and obtain initial evidence of validity and reliability for a scale designed to assess teachers' entrepreneurial competence.MethodAn instrumental, cross-sectional, non-experimental study was conducted with a convenience sample of 477 primary education teachers from Castilla-La Mancha (Spain). Content validity was assessed through expert judgment. Exploratory factor analysis (EFA), confirmatory factor analysis (CFA), and Exploratory Structural Equation Modeling (ESEM) were conducted to examine the internal structure of the instrument. Internal consistency was estimated using ordinal alpha and McDonald's omega, while convergent and discriminant validity were assessed using the average variance extracted (AVE), the Fornell–Larcker criterion, and the Heterotrait–Monotrait Ratio (HTMT), and 95% bootstrap confidence intervals for the HTMT coefficients.ResultsThe analyses supported a multidimensional structure composed of 16 items distributed across five related dimensions: Skills, Traits, Values/Self-image, Knowledge, and Motives. The scale showed excellent content validity, acceptable internal consistency for most dimensions, and favorable evidence of convergent and discriminant validity. Although the CFA provided mixed evidence regarding model fit, the ESEM solution showed substantially better fit indices and provided complementary evidence supporting the representation of entrepreneurial competence as a system of related but distinguishable dimensions.ConclusionsThe findings provide initial evidence supporting the use of the Teacher Entrepreneurial Competence Scale as a multidimensional instrument for assessing entrepreneurial competence among primary education teachers. The results further suggest that entrepreneurial competence is more appropriately represented through an ESEM framework than by a traditional independent-cluster CFA model. The scale may be useful for educational research, teacher professional development, and the evaluation of entrepreneurship education initiatives, although additional validation studies in independent samples and diverse educational contexts are warranted.