This article is part of the FT’s Financial Literacy and Inclusion Campaign joint seasonal appeal with Magic Breakfast
The children scurry around from bank to café, supermarket, TV station and various municipal offices. A farmer drives by on his tractor taking produce to be sold, while nearby a photographer is earning money in their studio.
This is not taking place in a real town but a make-believe one in a warehouse on the outskirts of Finland’s capital, Helsinki. Dozens of sixth-graders, 12- and 13-year-olds, are taking part in Yrityskylä, a national network of business villages designed to improve their financial literacy.
Fully 91 per cent of Finnish students take part in a 10-lesson programme, during which they learn how business, the economy and society work as well as how to apply for a job. Finally, they are let loose in the business village for a day to practice teamwork in their work uniforms, buy drinks and food with the money they earn, and even find out what happens if they spend too much and they need to make emergency cash.
“It was so fun,” recalls Taika Smith, now a 17-year-old economics student. “It was the first moment I knew I wanted to do something in business. It was lovely to talk to people, and to do some maths related to economics.”
Finland aims to achieve the best financial literacy in the world by 2030, and projects such as Yrityskylä are a big part of the push. Already in 2018, Finland placed second financial literacy at schools (behind Estonia) in the Pisa rankings from the OECD.
The Financial Times launched the Financial Literacy and Inclusion Campaign in 2021 to democratise teaching about money and finance with free, engaging content for young people across the UK. This year’s seasonal charity appeal supports both FLIC and Magic Breakfast, a UK charity providing more than 200,000 young people a day with their first meal of the day.
Finland has been taking financial literacy and the importance of good school meals seriously for many years, so it seemed an obvious place to seek inspiration on what is possible.
“The goal in Finland regarding financial literacy is that people make sustainable and value-creating economic decisions,” said Simo Karvinen, a teacher at Lauttasaari High School for International Business in Helsinki. “These decisions are made in various roles, whether as individuals, in households, in businesses, or almost in all activities within society. Therefore, it’s not just about how to manage your own financial wellbeing and capital.”
Anu Raijas, a financial literacy adviser at the museum of the Finnish central bank who led the writing of the national strategy on financial education, said the Nordic country still had more to do, particularly with women and less-educated young people.
But she added that Finnish schools did a good job of preparing students for working life through financial lessons in subjects such as social studies, home economics and mathematics. “What is important at a societal level is that financial literacy makes people equal. So they are in the same position in being an active citizen,” she said.
This is evident at Yrityskylä, where the children also get to vote in city hall meetings as well as work in their respective businesses and behave as consumers.
“It’s very important in preventing the marginalisation, that every child and young person across Finland should have the possibility to learn and practice these skills, whether it’s financial skills, working life, entrepreneurship, or being part of society,” said Kaisa Koistinen, director at Junior Achievement Finland, a non-profit education organisation that runs Yrityskylä.
She added that “learning by doing” or through gamification was vital in addition to more theoretical lessons.
That is also in evidence at the secondary upper school in Salo, a town 110km west of Helsinki known as home to a large, now-closed mobile phone factory for Nokia. A class of 17- to 18-year-olds are playing a game simulating the running of a hotel. They receive a specific piece of information — for instance, that an epidemic has stopped international travel but boosted domestic demand — and have to set room rates, staffing levels and marketing expenditure as they compete with each other for customers.
“I’m trying to make money; I don’t care about my employees so much,” said one boy jokingly, before teacher Otso Karhumäki and another student won that round. They priced their rooms lower than the competition and so sold twice as many. The whiteboard soon flashes up every team’s sales, ebitda (earnings before interest tax, depreciation and amortisation), net profit and total shareholder return. It is part of an accounting class, mostly for business students, and soon they are poring the annual accounts of a local company.
“Yes, it’s complicated but it is also interesting. It will help me in the future when I’m starting my own company,” said Vilma Vainio, one of the students. She added: “We know a lot about money at our age thanks to school. Then we can make good choices.”
Downstairs, in the main hall of the modern building — constructed when Nokia was still booming — a modest breakfast is being served with hot drinks, fruit and bread. The year before, the school served a bigger breakfast including porridge every day and both pupils and teachers noticed the difference.
“They talked more. They were more active,” 18-year-old Jore Lunden said of his fellow students. Merita Suikkanen, a teacher, added that staff hoped the municipality would restart the offer: “They were so much more active in lessons so we hope it comes back.”
A plentiful lunch is still available at the school and free for all students. It is a popular offer, and Lunden said he appreciated it even more after an exchange with a Spanish school where the food was much worse.
Back in the classroom, students are explaining how their studies have sparked an interest in entrepreneurship, one of the big hopes for financial literacy teaching. Ilmari Sanaksenaho and Teemu Lahtinen, two 17-year-olds, have started a construction business and, through Facebook, have built a sauna and shed for rubbish containers.
A group of six girls explain how they won a local “hackathon” by attracting more young people to a local music festival thanks to a fashion show and a rapper. Their campaign went down so well they are hoping to make it an annual tradition. “We have learned a lot of practical things that we needed,” said Emmi Koivumäki, one of the girls in the final year of school before university. Another, Emilia Malkov, added: “The biggest thing is learning to communicate with other people. It’s more than just sitting at our desks.”
Financial literacy is taught through various subjects in the Finnish system. At Lauttasaari high school, which even boasts a school dog, a social studies lesson for 14- and 15-year-olds is concentrating on the changes in Finland’s workforce in the past century as it moved from an agricultural society to a more urban one. The children, shyly, share what their grandparents did. As with the classes in Salo, there is a spirit of collaboration between pupils and teacher rather than one-way dictation and rote-learning. And the social studies curriculum goes beyond economics and includes how democracy and Finnish society work.
“It helps us to learn about the environment we are living in. It prepares us for life as an adult,” said Fiinu Sarlund, a 14-year-old. Her 15-year-old classmate Nessa Daifi added: “I used to be at school in the US before — we learned a lot less of this stuff.”
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