Baby economics

How – and why – ten-year-olds are being taught to run a business

There’s an excited buzz in the Year 6 class of Yeading Junior School, in outer London. The ten-year-olds recently set up a polytunnel in the school grounds, and now they’re deciding which vegetables to plant in the new polythene greenhouse. Their teacher, Mrs Taylor, is cheerful but firm: ‘When the vegetables are grown, we’ll sell them for profit. Let’s work out how much we should charge for different vegetables. What should we consider?’

Hands shoot up. Bespectacled Alan notes that the more seeds we sow, the more money we make. Mansoor points out we’ll have to calculate the price of each seed, as seeds are sold in packets of hundreds. Another voice pipes up that we can’t price the vegetables too high, or nobody will buy them. Other issues are discussed — what will be the cost of total outlay, of compost, fertiliser, pots? What if some seeds don’t germinate? Why might it be cleverer to charge £1.99 rather than £2? Should we undercut the neighbourhood garden centre? Would that be nasty, considering we’re all in a recession? (‘I don’t see why not,’ someone says stoutly. ‘We’ll be spending a lot of time on this thing.’)

The class, populated with a number of students from lower-income families, is having a maths lesson. Sometimes, like today, Mrs Taylor incorporates into the lesson every­day situations and problems for which mathematics comes in handy. There’s also a conscious effort to plant the seeds of financial knowledge and responsibility. In other words, the children are being given financial education, a subject that’s already taken root in many countries, from Canada to Brazil.

In the UK, the main champion of financial education is a charity called the Personal Finance Education Group or pfeg.