Squirrel Education is positively impacting schools worldwide in terms of teaching financial literacy for children
“My dream as a child was to become a professional sportsman”, says Ben Bolger, who hails from East London in the UK. It was a dream come true when for a number of years, he was a professional athlete.
Today, Ben resides in Abu Dhabi where he has lived since 2012 working in the wealth management sector supporting hundreds of individuals, families and businesses with their financial planning needs.
A chance meeting with Matthew O’Bryan, a schoolteacher for over 20 years with a history of leadership positions in numerous schools and countries, eventually led to the creation of Squirrel Education, a digital platform that creates financial literacy solutions to help kids make sense of money.
“Matthew was running a very successful financial literacy programme with his students in class,” says Ben. “It was a kind of manual banking programme, with the students using pretend money to create a virtual economy of buying, selling, investing and saving.”
The programme simulated many of the financial decision-making tasks that adults face every day. Students earned a weekly salary in fictitious currency, learned about entrepreneurship through cake sales, budgeting through renting textbooks and investment by putting money into savings accounts that could earn a return.
The exercise also acted as a classroom rewards programme whereby children were rewarded with extra funds for good behaviour, and equally, had funds deducted for negative behaviour. It was a lightbulb moment for both Ben and Matthew.
“We became very obsessed about building a platform for schools that would model and build the positive behaviours Mathew was witnessing in his classroom,” says Ben.
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Alongside his corporate career, Ben is also an accredited trainer of the Chartered Institute of Securities and Investments and conducts seminars and technical training to the most promising financial planners in the UK.
This allowed Ben to see how basic financial literacy concepts are misunderstood by adults and, therefore, he is passionate about changing the lives of the next generation through financial education.
On the face of it, the partnership between Ben and Matthew was a recipe for success. However, both founders came from a non-tech background, making it a tall order to try build an education-tech digital platform.
“It wasn’t entirely the best recipe for success,” says Ben, “but eventually we located a company in the United States who are the leading developers of the biggest financial literacy platform in the States.”
Today, Squirrel Education, a self-directed digital learning platform, is positively impacting the schools all over the world, including here in the UAE, in terms of teaching financial literacy for children.
Supporting seven to 18-year-olds in mastering money management in their own time, the platform ensures pupils experience a wide range of real-world financial management activities in the classroom.
Students are taught about investing, savings accounts, budget management, paying bills, preparing for emergency expenses, and so much more, through a series of fun and competitive scenarios.
However, the platform’s pièce de resistance from a busy teacher’s point of view is that it uses very little class time, with students encouraged to spend an average of just 10-15 minutes per week on the platform, often during homeroom time.
“There is really not enough room within most schools’ curriculums to add another subject such as financial literacy,” explains Ben. “With teaching staff already working to capacity, the Squirrel platform is easy to implement within the school ecosystem without adding too much pressure on them.”
Both Matthew and Ben’s ambition is to increase well-being by giving young people the chance to develop the knowledge, understanding and habits to make good financial decisions.
For more information, visit squirreledu.co
