The Southfield Economist
At Southfield, we recognise that financial literacy is an essential life skill. In a world of rising economic complexity, it is more important than ever that children are equipped with the tools to understand money, make informed decisions, and navigate the financial landscape of adult life.
Our whole school initiative, The Southfield Economist, embeds financial education meaningfully across the curriculum from Reception through to Year 6, providing all pupils with regular, purposeful opportunities to engage with the value, function and responsibility of money.
Each year group experiences bespoke lessons tailored to their developmental stage, building on key concepts year by year. Younger children explore the fundamentals of money: identifying coins, understanding needs versus wants, and beginning to make simple choices and transactions through play based shop activities. As children progress through the school, they delve into more sophisticated financial topics including budgeting, saving, taxation, debt, employment, mortgages and even ethical consumerism.
These lessons are not confined to the classroom. Our pupils have taken part in high quality, hands on activities and immersive learning experiences such as building home budgets, designing alien recipes with cost constraints, holiday planning with fixed expenses, and navigating rationing through the lens of wartime scarcity. From exploring map based co-ordinates to running their own shape shop enterprises, pupils learned how mathematics, decision making and economic understanding work together in real world scenarios.
To ensure that our community remains informed and involved, we have also delivered parent workshops explaining the scope and importance of this work. These have supported meaningful conversations about money management at home, strengthening the link between school learning and real-life application.
The Financial Literacy programme at Southfield is underpinned by core educational values: experiential learning, problem solving, and critical thinking. Children learn through exploration, collaboration, and real-life simulations that demand creativity and responsibility. They are not only learning to count money, they are learning how to use it wisely, ethically, and with awareness of the world around them.
Through The Southfield Economist, our pupils are gaining confidence not just in their maths skills, but in their ability to make smart financial decisions, to weigh options with care, and to step boldly into the future as financially literate, economically aware citizens.
