Financial literacy learning is as important as maths, English and science
Julian Wright, Head of Education Expansion at RedSTART, writes about the need for financial literacy teaching if we are to become a money-savvy society… Rarely a week goes by when a story appears in the news detailing one of the many ways we as a nation are in some way personally in debt. Whether this is the spiralling costs of housing, the amount of debt students are leaving university with, or the amount sitting unpaid on our maxed out credit cards. The general message seems to be that as citizens of the UK, we do not understand how money works and our financial literacy is poor at best, and non-existent at worst. However, despite these constant warnings about the damage to the UK economy, and individual lives, this ‘financial ignorance’ causes, there still seems no appetite to rectify this. Despite calls from various charities, financial education remains all-but absent from the national curriculum. One of those charities is RedSTART, an organisation committed to providing key financial education to young pupils in schools. Their focus is on primary schools, as it is generally recognised that children develop their saving and spending habits early on – by the age of seven. Although financial education is not on the primary school curriculum, this doesn’t prevent teachers from integrating it into existing lessons. The bitesize ‘Money Matters’ lesson plans provided by RedSTART integrate a lot of the PSHE curriculum into its topics, allowing teachers to deliver key financial understanding as part of the school day. However this also doesn’t need to be limited to these sessions. By understanding the key elements that underpin financial literacy, teachers can contextualise and adapt existing curriculum items to deliver the same message. For example, it is a statutory requirement within the year 5 programme of study within the maths curriculum that pupils ‘recognise the percent symbol (%) and understand that percent relates to ‘number of parts per hundred’. When teaching this and other elements of percentages, there is no reason this cannot be contextualised to show how interest rates work. If you had a savings account that paid 5% interest per year (we wish!), and you had £500 in that account, how much interest would you earn in a year? Alternatively: If you had a credit card that charged 5% interest per month and you had a debt of £1000 on your card, how much interest would you pay in a month? And having introduced the concept of ‘interest’ as a percentage, it is only one very important step to teaching ‘compound interest’ – “He who understands it earns it, he who doesn’t pays it” (Albert Einstein). Opportunities to contextualise financial literacy are available throughout the curriculum, once the key concepts such as risk, reward, borrowing, lending, budgeting, goal setting and of course, compound interest have been taught. If pupils aren’t learning financial literacy in the home then the classroom is the most appropriate place to break that cycle. RedSTART Educate’s financial literacy resources can be found at redstarteducate.org and Julian can be found on linkedin.com Photo: Learning about financial literacy with RedSTART at The Oak Bank.
Picture News – taking the weekly news agenda into schools
The 24/7 news cycle, social media and ‘fake news’ make it hard for even the savviest to keep up with what’s really happening in the world. Picture News is the simple yet brilliant new resource that enables schools to encourage children to question what they hear and read, to think around key issues and topics and develop ‘healthy’ news mindsets. The Picture News team consists of qualified teachers. Each week they choose the latest big news story, turn it into a vibrant A2 poster with a thought-provoking question and create an assembly plan with British values, Key Stage1 and Key Stage2 focus cards. The materials are available to schools as a download or printed and posted direct to the school. Promoting British values Since 2014, teachers must promote five key British values and their promotion is inspected by Ofsted. To achieve ‘outstanding’ status schools must engage with and promote these values in a meaningful way and the Picture News service builds consideration and discussion of these values into all of their teaching materials. Picture News is the brainchild of Early Years educational expert Katie Harrison, a mother of 3, based in Yorkshire and a former primary school teacher. Katie specialises in teaching Philosophy and Religious Education and is passionate about helping children understand and think critically about life’s big questions and issues. She also worked for a number of years in Education Sales and Training and founded Picture News with her partner Rob Harrison in 2015. Since launching the service has gone from strength to strength with more than 1500 schools signed up. The Picture News service is available in three levels suitable for: Early Years Primary School, and Years 7, 8 and 9 Schools can subscribe to the Picture News service as a hard-copy or email service with prices ranging from as little as £50 per year for email only access, to £300 per year for the full service where they receive posters and all materials in the post and via email each week. For more information on Picture News, see the website here.
Time to face the automation challenge with soft skills
Catherine Whitaker, CEO & Head of Learning at EtonX, discusses the teaching of “soft skills” in order to prepare students for the workplace… Workers around the world will have been disappointed, but perhaps not surprised by, the World Economic Forum’s Future of Jobs report which predicted that 78 million jobs worldwide will disappear in the next few years with automation. Key aspects of jobs, from manufacturing to professional services, will be digitised and artificial intelligence will take over analytical roles currently reserved for humans. The report wasn’t all doom scenarios though. It estimates that if we can upskill our workforces’ technical skills like programming as well as soft skills such as critical thinking, we can create the jobs to replace those lost and add more in the future. By the forum’s estimates 133 million of them. Problem solved – maybe. But a fundamental worry for educators and employers is that recent research shows a worldwide lack of formal teaching of soft skills that power the adaptability needed in the workplace. We often don’t teach life skills such as entrepreneurship and public speaking to teenagers because education systems are geared to academic subjects and exam results. With no globally-accredited soft skills syllabuses and examinations, these subjects remain intangible or difficult to practise. Global data reveal employers and academics’ worries that bright teenagers with strong grades struggle to acquire skills that are key to them getting to grips with university or the workplace. A 2017 McKinsey report Technology, Jobs and the Future of Work found that a majority (60%) of employers feel graduates were not adequately prepared for work. A 2018 Bloomberg Next / Workday survey found that nearly half of US academic institutions said new recruits lack the soft skills needed to perform at a high level. In the UK, a CBI-Pearson Skills Survey in 2017 found that a majority (51%) of UK business executives is concerned by graduates’ poor analytical skills. Almost half (48%) were troubled by new employees’ lack of resilience. It’s not surprising that eminent educators like Sir Anthony Seldon, Vice Chancellor at the University of Buckingham, interviewed for The Economist’s Educating for the Future index, believe that education systems worldwide are ‘ill-fitting’ for the 21st-century workplace’s skills needs. While advanced economies are identifying core soft skills, according to the same report’s evaluation of countries’ digital strategies, only Canada gets top marks for having a strategy targeting future skills and a curriculum framework to support it. Soft skills’ value is, however, finally being identified. The World Economic Forum’s analysis of over 200 studies worldwide shows students with social and emotional learning instruction achieve academic outcomes on average 11 percentage points higher than those without. The best schools always find a way to blend soft skills with academic or technical subjects, giving teenagers the rounded education they need. Rather than criticism, schools need more tools to strike the fine balance of new and traditional skills teaching. Education innovators are coming forward with practical tools to help busy schools formalise their teaching of these subjects. EtonX has launched online soft skills courses for international schools and colleges called the Future Skills Programme to address such issues. And it’s technology – in the shape of virtual classrooms – that is allowing us to deliver a breakthrough in soft skills teaching. These innovations replicate and improve on the best of physical classes and allow teachers to act as facilitators of debate and discussion between students to promote skills development; the old style of online learning confined teachers to the role of a lecturer. Students can now learn more effectively with and from their peers in group classes online. If the class participants are gathered from different countries, then students develop the skills they will need in the future to work in cross-functional, multi-national and distributed teams. The virtual wall of a computer screen also helps students step out of their comfort zones in activities such as role plays and participate less self-consciously than they would in a traditional classroom. While we will doubtless lose sleep over the prospect of jobs being reshaped as artificial intelligence shows its capabilities, I believe we are entering a new generation of learning – one that will open up wider life and vocational opportunities for our children than we have ever previously imagined. See etonx.com for more details on the teaching of soft skills. EtonX Future Skills Programme video: https://vimeo.com/289087724
KidZania London STEAMs into October
Launching Friday 5 to Sunday 7 October, KidZania London – the indoor city run by kids at Westfield London, Shepherd’s Bush – will be hosting an action-packed STEAM Week, inspiring kids to develop their skills across science, technology, engineering, arts and mathematics. With 2018 seeing the launch of the government’s Year of Engineering campaign, of which KidZania is an official partner, there has been an increased focus towards recognizing and celebrating STEM subjects and careers spanning science, technology, engineering, and mathematics. However, KidZania also recognises that the demand for arts resources has also rocketed, as teachers are increasingly championing the importance of creative thinking and visual learning in the classroom. The three-day STEAM festival will look to merge these disciplines together, demonstrating that no matter where children’s strengths are, whether its number crunching or a way with words, there are careers and opportunities out there for everyone to explore. From STEAM-themed world record challenges with Guinness World Records Live, to slimy Jelly Belly X-ray operations with PDSA and structure building workshops with Engineering Development Trust, there will be fun and educational workshops to bring the school syllabus to life – whether that’s on a school trip or a weekend visit with the family. Eddie Kemsley, CEO at KidZania comments: “Embracing creativity through the arts is something we positively encourage at KidZania – whether through our Book of The Month Activity with Little Tiger, inspiring even the most reluctant book worms, to our music academy and dance studio. We are hugely excited to be incorporating this into our existing STEM focus, to really demonstrate the wide variety of subjects and career opportunities out there. She continues: Not everyone can be great at numbers or science, but as some of the most innovative engineerable solutions have been developed by creative thinkers, it’s important for us to be able to showcase the importance of arts subjects too.” Exciting partnership activities include: Take the Guinness World Record Challenge 5th – 7th October Does your child have what it takes to be the next Guinness World Record Holder? KidZania’s Guinness World Record Live event will put kids to the test with one of three STEAM-themed world record challenges. Jelly Belly Operation at PDSA – Saturday 6th October Join PDSA for a fun and interactive Jelly Belly Operation. Examine X- rays and find the foreign bodies in our pet patient’s slimy stomach! Design and Build with the Engineering Development Trust 5th – 7th October Come and get involved in one of our fun ‘hands on’, design, build and test challenges with the Engineering Development Trust.. KidZania believes in ‘Learning by Doing’. By bringing the classroom to life in the city, it aims to boost children’s curiosity and imagination through curriculum-based real-life activities. To book tickets for your school trip now, please email schools@kidzania.co.uk or call 0330 131 3335. See KidZania.co.uk for more details. Twitter – @KidZaniaLondon Instagram – @KidZaniaLondon Facebook – /KidZaniaLondon Pricing: Access to all additional activities is included in the entrance price £14 per child. Reduced pricing available for schools with a high Pupil Premium level Learning outcomes: KS1 – KS2 Science KS1 – KS3 Maths, Art, Design & Technology and PSHE About KidZania London: At KidZania London, children can take part in real-life adventures. Spanning across 75,000 square feet, KidZania is an amazing indoor city built just for kids! KidZania provides children with the opportunity try out a variety of real life role-play activities from being a firefighter, journalist to a surgeon. Each role-play is developed to teach kids essential life skills including financial literacy, teamwork and independence. Designed to empower and entertain kids, KidZania gives them the chance to challenge themselves and gets children thinking about which career they may pursue in the future. KidZania is a unique role-play experience for 4-14 year olds, blending learning with reality and entertainment.