After eighteen years of working with schools through Junior Trader, I still find that some of the most valuable insights come not from reports or statistics, but from conversations with experienced teachers.
This week I spoke with the Head of Futures at one of the UK’s leading independent girls’ schools. We covered university, apprenticeships, financial education, safeguarding and why enrichment matters more than ever. A few things stood out.
The first was the changing balance of power in graduate recruitment. Her view was simple: employers increasingly hold the cards. Competition for graduate roles is intensifying while the cost of university keeps climbing, so apprenticeships are becoming a more attractive route. What struck me most was who’s driving that shift. Not students, but parents, scrutinising return on investment, student debt and long-term career prospects far more closely than a decade ago.
We also talked about something I’ve worried about for a while: safeguarding in financial education. Students can now access highly speculative, largely unregulated financial products from their phones with very little grasp of the risk involved. Access to markets has never been easier, and financial literacy hasn’t kept pace with it. Teaching young people to tell the difference between investing and speculation, and speculation from gambling, is becoming one of the harder jobs in financial education today.
Enrichment is an area where this school continues to stand out. Every time I’ve worked with its students, I’ve been struck by the quality of their questions. That doesn’t happen by accident, but comes from a culture that rewards curiosity and invests in opportunities beyond the classroom.
Our conversation then turned to our From Cotton to Capital Manchester tour. Originally designed for sixth form, she suggested it could work just as well for younger pupils, as they’re starting to make decisions about GCSE”s, A-levels and beyond. I agreed.
The tour explores Manchester’s financial markets and commercial development, but it’s really about more than finance: subjects covered include psychology, economics, geography, industrial history, regeneration, and the decisions that shape cities over generations. Students leave understanding how industries evolve and why places rise or fall.
Then she raised something I hadn’t considered and that was inviting parents along t0 attend the tour with their child.
The more I sat with it, the more it made sense. Career decisions are family decisions now. Parents are the ones researching apprenticeships, weighing university costs, and helping their children make sense of a genuinely complicated set of options. There’s no obvious reason those conversations should stop at the school gates.
Maybe the most useful part of a day like this isn’t the walk itself. It’s the understanding, memories and conversation after.
If you’d like to find out more about how Junior Trader can provide enrichment for your students, including our Manchester tour, we’d welcome the chance to talk it through. And if the safeguarding point resonated, that’s worth a conversation of its own.
#TradeSafe
