Finance and You

Planning

The Pathfinder project was underpinned by a unit from our AVCE Business course.  This was unit 19:  Personal Finance.

We the students were involved in the discussion of the project to ensure that the research outcomes were relevant.

We decided on the age range we will concentrate on for our research, which is this is from 16 to 24.  The reason for this is because we realised that at the age of 16, young people begin to make some financial decisions, usually related to education. We also realised that by the age of 24, young people begin to make decisions on most of their important financial matters.

The research aimed to find out exactly what young people in Tower Hamlets actually know about financial matters which are relevant to them now and to the future. We also aimed to widen this to include legal aspects, related to finance, that they should also know about.

42 students took this questionnaire away of the end of the Autumn Term. We were also given the brief to ask young people (male and female) between the ages of 16-24 to answer it.

We wanted to collect personal details such as the age, gender and ticked answers to what the young people knew.

A grouped of ten people then worked on the project. We were chosen since we progressed well with our own work and also expressed an interest in working after school day.

We then analysed the returned the questionnaire and put it on the database. This was later transferred to a spreadsheet to ease of producing charts from the data.

We finalised the data for the FSA conference, which Steve Stillwell had organised, and, then we began planning the presentation for our workshop.

We were assisted by a variety of people from business. Some of these were as follows: Ruth Sullivan (NatWest ‘Face-to-Face’), Ansu Marrow and other FSA graduates, the Tower Hamlets City Learning Centre and those involved in the Pathfinder project.

We made regular visits to Merrill Lynch in which we practised our presentational skills with various employees including Bradley Styles and Rochelle Lonsdale.

Personally, I enjoyed working with other business students, external people and also working out of normal school hours.  The Pathfinder project has enabled me to enhance my presentational skills and increased my confidence, knowledge and skills.