Auckland Girls' Grammar is a school in central Auckland composed of majority Māori and Pacific students. Around 90% of students live outside the school's zone, with some travelling up to two hours to attend, just because they want to be there. Banqer has been used to teach financial literacy to every Year 9 student at Auckland Girls' Grammar since last year, run as a Term 3 unit within the Social Sciences faculty. Under Head of Faculty Matheus Elling, it's become the structural backbone of the unit, with worksheets and activities of the faculty's own built in around it.
Building the spine, then adding around it
When we used Banqer last year, everyone really liked it, teachers and students as well. Teachers really liked the structure and the order of the subjects, the spine that Banqer provides.
Over the year, the faculty found their own balance between the platform and the classroom. Matheus points out it's not always easy for teachers to have enough activities and worksheets ready for students working at different levels, but he says Banqer's range of resources gave him something to draw on for that.
The activities and worksheets on Banqer were very good. It was nice because we could differentiate. At the end of the year, I asked the economics team to come up with group or hands-on activities that we would feed into what Banqer has. So Banqer is the skeleton and now we add stuff that's more collaborative.
Why Social Science is a natural fit for Financial Literacy
Students often assume they're bad at maths, even when the results say otherwise. A lot of students will complain that they don't understand mathematics, they don't know maths. But they are doing pretty well with this.
Matheus puts that down to context, pointing to something as simple as a discount on shoes. If you talk about shoes being on sale, and that's 15%, or that's GST, they can relate to that. Here it happens automatically, because social sciences relies on that real world context, and Banqer's activities are built around giving it to them.
If you go through Banqer with a social science lens, you have so much social science there, and that's particularly what I love.
“I can teach taxes and thresholds but I can also discuss, 'where is the taxation money going and why? Why does education not get more? What does it mean taking money from this area and putting it in that area,' and that is social science."
Percentages and calculation still get taught along the way. I want them to learn the maths, especially percentages, because you use this every day, it's a good skill to have. But ultimately, the act of financial literacy is the actual 'let me stop and think about this financial decision,' the buying a car that's too expensive, the having a credit card, that type of thing. That's the skill I want them to take in the end.
Teaching salary, tax and making numbers hit home
The first lesson of the term asks students to plan their dream life. The very first lesson we delivered this term was one where they had to plan their dream life, how many kids, what's the job.
Matheus gives them real figures to work with. So you're going to earn the average salary of a woman in New Zealand, which is $68,000 a year, and the cost of each child, according to data as well, is $16,000 a year.
Some students had planned for three or four kids, until the cost sank in. Walking around the room, Matheus started hearing the same reaction. They're like 'sir, I don't want to have three kids.'
It's exactly the reaction he was after. My main goal with this unit, and Banqer is giving them the knowledge to think about these types of decisions. I'm not saying don’t have kids. I’m saying if you want to have three kids, you do that consciously.
Tax caught one student out completely. One of the girls came to me and said, 'Sir, something happened with my Banqer, I probably got a bug or whatever,' because a third of it was removed because of taxes. So instead of getting $60,000, she got like $40,000, and her whole life was planned around $60,000.
When Matheus explained there was no bug, the student got so worked up, he laughed and said, 'Now you're acting like a proper adult, complaining about taxes and all of it.' Matheus sees this reaction as the real payoff of the lesson. “Those little things happen quite often, and it's pretty cool to see."
What Matheus would tell other schools
Asked what he'd say to schools considering Banqer, Matheus goes straight to what's missing elsewhere in his subject area. Having an online software platform to work in our area, social science, is pretty rare. It's refreshing to have something with the quality, the structure of Banqer, in social science.
Matheus sees social sciences as a better fit for financial literacy than maths itself, because the subject gives numbers a reason to matter.
It's not easy for us to incorporate maths authentically, and with literacy and numeracy required in every subject now, Banqer allows us to meet part of the curriculum that's important but quite difficult sometimes to apply.
With the new social sciences curriculum, Matheus doesn't expect much to change in how Banqer gets used at Auckland Girls' Grammar. For a unit already built around Banqer as its backbone, that continuity is the plan.
