One of the things primary schools are encouraged to do these days is to start to prepare children for life in the real world as far as understanding jobs and finance goes. This could be a very heavy subject, so we take a light-hearted approach to it. Mr Hillier delivers a very informal, low pressure, low stakes course to the children.
In this, they apply for a job with Globex, CEO one Hank Scorpio. Simpsons fans will know the character, very much a Bond villain with plans for world domination. We do a bit on how to write a cover letter, actually write a cover letter and then ‘Hank’ appoints each child to a post.
The jobs range from someone to look after Mr Scorpio’s cat, to being his right hand henchman. There are plenty of technicians, security people and even a doctor and mental health practitioner. Salaries range from £25,000 right up to a million. Mostly they’re randomly allocated – some are tailored to the children’s personalities, interests or what they put in their application letter.
They get an offer letter and gross salary. They learn how much of that disappears to become nett income. We then look as fixed costs such as utilities, council tax etc to find disposable income.
We then go online to see what we have left and try to find ourselves a house or flat to buy or, more likely, rent. Some of us even decide to house share!
Next up- where we are now – we try to get a weekly shop out of our disposable income. again, we go online and do this in the real world, but without ever checking out! We’re doing two versions of the shop – the budget one and the ‘premium’ one, to see what we can save by being thrifty.
Still to come, buying a car – always a popular session – and planning holidays. We’ll talk about saving too.
It’s all good fun. When we say low stakes, we mean there are no rights and wrongs, no marked outcomes; all we want is the children to have some understanding of the value of money and perhaps some of the challenges their adults face in decision making! In the past many Year 6 children have cited it as one of their favourite subjects. We usually do it for some downtime after SATs but with Mr H’s early departure, were doing it now.