One essential feature of our Keep the Cash! programme is to show students the link between their career choices, and their overall personal and financial well being.
Although Keep the Cash! is badged as financial education, it is the one programme which has always been rooted in the idea that it is fatuous to see finance as a stand alone set of problems, somehow unrelated to career development, knowledge of how the jobs market works, CV writing and a number of other related skills.
How can one seriously think about personal finance if one has no source of income? So getting a job and generating personal cash flow is the only sound basis for building a stable, solvent and independent adult life.
Ofsted‘s report on the state of careers education in England is a damning indictment of our current inability to provide students with careers education and information of any real value. Ofsted makes the extraordinary claim that current government policy on careers education, which they say is characterised by the “lack of an overarching strategy” , is leaving a whole generation of students unready for work.
The report goes on to highlight a number of failures in both the provision of careers education, and the links between schools and businesses as well as a lack of external resources, known and trusted by schools, which they can get easy access to, and which could help to plug the provision gap.
The overall picture the report paints is truly woeful, and we at Keep the Cash! and Ambitious Minds, have long had the view that a planned programme of finance related careers education is the only way to equip students with the set of robust and flexible skills they require to enter both the adult world in general, and the world of work in particular, with a half decent chance of success.
Choosing a career is a massive decision in the life of every student, and, just like finance, it is a matter of astonishment to me that we neglect it so frivolously at school.
These topics - choosing a career, getting to grips with finance, understanding how the property market works and its choices, becoming a tax payer and a citizen - are the essence of being an independent and self supporting adult. As we develop our second generation version of Keep the Cash!, we look forward to being able to offer a licence to every school in England, and beyond, to make sure that what Ofsted currently describes as the promotion of “financial capability” and its associated knowledge is something of truly universal availability.
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