Without wanting to get excessively cheesy to early on in a blog entry, but…

“I believe the children are our future, teach them well and let them lead the way.”

…and whilst I’d concur that this lyric is  massively cliched, overly simplistic and has lost much of it’s original meaning due to overuse there’s one lesson we seem to forget.

It’s also true.

We all know the importance of teaching our children (and grandchildren).

Parents and Schools, in the main and on the whole, do a decent job in teaching children in a wide range of areas from academic subjects, to life lessons all the way through to empathy and emotional intelligence.

However there’s a subject that many children don’t learn about sufficiently in school and find themselves receiving mixed confusing lessons from their parents (at least there the sort of ‘lessons’ I received in this area as a kid). The subject in question?

Money

So, if children are our future why don’t we sufficiently teach them about such a core component of our society. Why don’t we teach them not only about the practicalities of dealing with money but also some of the concepts, mental disciplines and tools the financially successful use as standard.

The answer is, we do to a certain extent, and thanks for organisations like the Personal Financial Education Group the issue of financial education is now more prominent than it’s been for many many years.

However there are other organisations who are doing their bit…

One bunch of decent fella’s who are doing their bit are the team from Redstart.

Redstart was set up and run by Rob Gardener, Freddie Ewer and Jonathan Letham, all of whom work within Redington (a financial consultancy firm specialising in helping the trustees of large pension funds make the right decisions for their members).

The program is designed to empower young people with the knowledge (and an overview of the skills) to make well informed financial decisions. It also highlights the importance of entrepreneurship (something I believe will be ever more important in future years).

A few weeks ago I managed to attend one of Redstarts events and even as someone who was just there to observe couldn’t help but find myself get excited about not only the knowledge being imparted, but also of the incredible enthusiasm and dynamism of the kids in the room….they clearly loved it!

However the perspective I’m especially excited about sharing with you is Kelly’s. If you’re a regular reader of this blog you know that Kelly works within my business and came on board as an apprentice last year.

I thought as opposed to getting the perspective of me, who left school 20 years ago it would be useful to get Kelly’s perspective on what Redstart are doing.

So I took her along. This is what she said…

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A few weeks ago Chris and I attended a not so usual business event.

You see in the room were 8 primary school students along with a couple of people from the business RedSTART who put the day together.

Being 18, leaving school and getting my first ever job and earning my own money was great, it’s just the one thing I didn’t really have was good money management.

In school, we learned about money but not as much as I think we should have. After all everyone needs to know how to manage their money for pretty much their whole lives.

RedSTART from my perspective is effectively those working in the financial services sector teaching the younger crowd just that!

Whilst sitting in on two sessions which were presented by Jonathan Letham and Frederick Patten at Payden & Rygel in London, it was very interesting to hear the pupils thoughts and ideas, although some of them were rather ambitious (for example one pupil’s goal was that he wanted 3 mansions, 20 sports cars and to be rich).

However, and in a way, they were not only teaching the pupils but they were also teaching me.

You see, I knew and understood what they were talking about but they really made me think about money in a different way. Especially when talking about goals, whether its buying a car, going on holiday or in the long run buying a house (although I reckon I’ve still got a few more years to go to achieve this one!)

One activity included selecting a goal and putting a plan in place on how to save up enough money to reach it. The goal was to save £25,000 for a car. The class then had to come up with the figures for things such as rent, bills and shopping.

All the children sat shouting out figures that, well let’s put it this way, showed how much kids of this age underestimate these costs.

In the second session Frederick spoke to the pupils about assets and if I’m honest they knew much more about it then I did when I was their age!

The assets that were mentioned were shares, government bonds, property and gold and how each individual asset could, potentially earn you money if you invested correctly.

In this session there was an exercise where you were metaphorically given £100 to invest over 1 year, 7 years and 20 years.

You could invest in

• Apple
• Kodak
• Gold
• Government bonds
• Or keep your money in ‘the bank’

The results were fascinating and  showed that basically you have to be thoughtful when you decide to invest and have to think carefully about the impact both inflation and making poor impulsive investment decisions could have on your money.

Overall the RedSTART day for me was defiantly interesting and I learnt quite a bit, not only from Jonathan and Frederick but also from the primary school kids and how they thought about money.

If I got something out of this event then I have to say those kids would have done as well maybe not exactly the same thing but it was defiantly a worthwhile experience…

…one I wish that I had when I was at school.

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So, both Kelly and I are fans of the Redstart program. We reckon it’s a positive step in the right direction and will grow in both scale and pace.

I also hope that the Redstart program acts as a catalyst and encourages more companies and individuals in financial services to get involved helping future generations to understand money better and earlier.

After all, and apologies again for being cheesy…

I believe the children are our future!

What do you think?