Patricia Bowles is the Director of Communications and Education at the British Columbia Securities Commission
In 2002, BC’s Ministry of Education revamped its entire public school curriculum, which included designating financial skill instruction as a mandatory subject for more than 55,000 Grade 10 students each year.
The BC Securities Commission (BCSC) took the initiative to design a comprehensive resource called The City: Financial Life Skills for Planning 10 as a teacher resource. Working with teachers, students, curriculum writers and financial experts from across the province, the BCSC quickly discovered that one of its biggest challenges was how to make financial education interesting and relevant to teenagers – 14 to 15 year olds!
The result was an interactive, activity-based resource using eight fictional lifestage characters whose stories represented a wide range of financial experiences. It seemed like a big enough challenge to create the resource, but the challenges increased ten fold as we began to market The City.
BC is a huge province geographically – five times the size of Washington State, its neighbour to the south. It has 4.5 million people spread out over an area twice the size of France with 60 school districts and over 500 high schools.
We began by attending conferences and mailing out information to all of the schools. In the first two years, over 1,400 teachers requested the resource. Then we began to face our second and most important challenge: How to teach the teachers how to teach financial life skills. If that is a mouthful to say, it was an even bigger one to deliver on.
We learned very quickly that teachers were not trained to teach this subject, many had never learned these skills in their school education. Just looking at the subject matter was daunting to many – budgeting, savings, credit and debt, insurance, taxes and investing. One of the course outcomes was for students to create a personal financial plan, a document they needed to prepare to meet their graduation requirements.
We started with free face-to-face seminars, but that was impractical for geographic reasons. We then created a webinar. All the teacher needed was a computer connected to the internet and a phone. We used teacher trainers and usually held two to three seminars a year. Still, we were only reaching a critical few and each year new teachers were assigned to the course, often unprepared, and not in a position to take the webinar.
Its five years later, and we believe we have made some progress. We now make presentations to graduating student teachers at the three teacher colleges in BC and offer free webinar or face-to-face training. This approach is more cost effective. It results in new teachers entering the system who are comfortable with the subject matter, a gift to those high schools struggling to find willing and able teachers for Planning 10.
As we learned how to market the resource and train the teachers, we felt it was important to do some research to find out if our resource was really working. You can go online and see that we have done two studies with graduate students in Kelowna. Prior to this course being taught in the high schools, students said that the one area they felt unprepared for after graduation was managing their finances. Now we see varying degrees of improvement in the students’ capabilities in managing money post high school. We also did several studies with the teachers to understand how they were using the resource.
Two years ago, the Canadian government decided that it needed to focus on teaching Canadian youth financial life skills. We agreed to license The City to the Financial Consumer Agency of Canada and worked with them to produce an on-line, interactive program that is available in English and French.
BC has taken one tiny step in the long journey to find the best way to teach financial life skills. We believe that much more needs to be done. For example, courses should be offered at different stages throughout the entire school system. Financial life skills should be taught to a whole range of groups – from new immigrants to First Nations and Aboriginal People.
In BC, we have decided to re-vamp our original resource to take into account some of the comments for improvement from teachers and to streamline some of the chapters. We plan to re-launch the resource this spring and will continue to run our teacher training program. We are working with Ontario’s Education Fund and with IIROC to increase awareness of the need to become financially literate through the Funny Money high school program. We also use the BC born and raised Smart Cookies to spread the word.
We believe we are just getting started in BC. We will be happy to share our experiences with the recently appointed Taskforce on Financial Literacy. Its work will be an important next step in producing a national strategy on financial literacy for Canada.
