“One of the most valuable super-curricular opportunities we offer”
Every so often a school sends through a few lines that say more about Junior Trader than I ever could myself. This week it was Kerrie Chisnall, Head of Economics at Manchester High School for Girls, marking the end of their third year running the programme with a spontaneous LinkedIn post. Kerrie’s reasons why are worth sharing to the wider network of schools because it reflects her exceptional relationship with students represents their enthusiasm.
Kerrie embraces the competition fully each year, always enters her own portfolio, and has daily discussions with students that I sense have a competitive edge. She even quietly asks me for clues as to what is going in my portfolio in an effort to outsmart her students. This is the type of teacher one remembers decades later and it does wonders for a school’s relationship with alumni. She clearly goes beyond using JT as a tool to educate, and takes the exercise further than JT’s current affairs framing to engage with her cohort.
Perhaps this is why the Independent Schools Inspectorate review also noticed Kerrie’s commitment to student enrichment, or why I chose MHSG to bring along Insider’s Business Editor Simon Keegan to observe a session.
Her starting point wasn’t the competition, or the prizes, or even the market data. It was the gap between what happens in a classroom and what happens in the real world. Students can learn the theory of markets from a textbook, but making an actual investment decision, under time pressure, as part of a team, defending that choice to people who’ll push back on it, is a different skill entirely. Schools can’t easily replicate alone, or with online trading simulators, and it’s the bit Kerrie says students remember.
The transferable skills point came up too, and it’s one we hear often but rarely broken down this clearly: researching a company properly, weighing financial information, justifying a call you might be wrong about, then writing it up as something a professional would actually read. Kerrie’s view is that this combination, not any single skill on its own, is what makes the programme valuable for whatever comes next, whether that’s university, an apprenticeship, or a first job. This leads nicely into the same standards set in JT+
What stood out most to me, though, was her point about MHSG being an all-girls school. Finance and investment are still fields where women were underrepresented, and Kerrie was clear that Junior Trader gives her students a supportive space to build confidence in exactly that territory, before they’re the only woman in the room somewhere that matters more. That’s not a side benefit. For a lot of schools, it’s the whole reason they signed up in the first place.
Kerrie always talks to me about enjoyment, the pride students take in their results, the motivation that comes from competing against other (boys!) schools, and the fact that this has become something pupils look forward to each year rather than something they’re signed up for once and forget. Three years of a competitive team exercise built around researching real companies could easily have worn thin. It hasn’t because we keep turning to stocks students know well – food, fashion and online retailers, stocks which rarely behave as predicted by the experts at xmas.
Financial education keeps getting talked about as something schools should do more of. Fewer schools actually find a way to make it stick. Kerrie’s summary of why Junior Trader has, for MHSG, is about as good a case as we could make ourselves. Our Jargon Busting start to the competition, and wealth management scenarios position students for their financial futures regardless of career choice.
“I would highly recommend Junior Trader to any school looking to enhance students’ financial literacy, employability skills and confidence.”
#TradeSafe
