Finance Matters

"The second anyone, of any age, has money of their own, they can and should start planning how best to use it – try telling that to a primary school child!

In these uncertain economic times, financial education has never been more important.

How do you get a primary school child to understand all about money?

As far as they’re concerned, when they get money, it’s all about chocolate, computer games or food on the way home! It gets pretty cold over here!!

The education system in UK is centred essentially on academic achievement in numeracy and literacy. It has a government focus called “Every Child Matters” which covers all aspects of a child’s development. The trouble is; teachers are burdened with a massive pressure to produce children who can achieve certain grades in the key academic subjects.

So, as you would expect, when your job evaluation depends on it, you focus on giving your employer what they want. Where is the child in this? Don’t get me wrong teachers are loyal and devoted people who have the child at the centre of all they do BUT, when you have an employer asking for specific grades from a child, you have to deliver.

Well, what does all this have to do with understanding about money or financial literacy?

Teachers in UK don’t have enough time to educate children in money matters and more and more these days the parents don’t do it. So children are educated by the media in its various forms. The soap operas watched by millions of kids probably does more for financial education than parents and teacher put together. What will that do for the future development of the UK and how might the big media companies and the like take advantage.

People-Evolution has created a programme that fills the gap and provides not only innovative learning, about all things financial, but many cross curricular learning that teachers can develop within their very tight curriculum.

This allows the children to experience different inputs from financial specialists and teachers can observe children learning about a subject which is crucial to their lives. It also extends this learning to parents so parent & child can learn together.

With the effects of the Global Financial Crisis, a very real nightmare for many people is that children will have to deal with the consequeces, it’s vital the younger generations understand the wise use of money and essential if they and the country are to prosper in a post Global Financial Crisis environment.

With simple coin recognition with “mega money” for the very young children to data analysis on finding the right mobile phone tariff for year six pupils the “Finance Matters” programme covers the complete range of financial literacy topics and frees teachers to focus on the core education of young people. Parents learn about credit and how to manage it and the basics of borrowing, all designed to give them practical help in the management of their finances.

With this programme complementing the work of the classroom teacher, the future leaders of small and large businesses in the UK may begin their passion for entrepreneurial exploits.

Who knows where that will take us but, at least they will know finance matters!

Richard Pascall is Managing Director of People-Evolution Ltd; a Learning & Development Consultancy who’s work includes the Finance Matters programme.

They also provide learning events to cure many corporate diseases including slow decision making; reluctance to change and weak leadership. Please contact if you would like to make more money or change your organisation quickly.

Contact details:
E) richard.pascall@people-evolution.co.uk
M) +44 (0) 7831 610 450
T) +44 (0) 20 8675 1806
Skype) rich.pascall