Helen’s story

Helen Roberts, Headteacher, Rampton Primary School

Financial education champion Helen Roberts is Headteacher at Rampton Primary School in Nottinghamshire with over 29 years’ experience in education. We asked her to share a few words on why financial education matters and how LifeSavers has made a difference to her school.

Our school is a small school in the middle of farmland – right now I have sheep to my left. It’s been a really tough few years for our teachers and children, coming through the pandemic years and readjusting to life at school. I’m enormously proud of what the children achieve on a daily basis and the teaching staff continue to amaze me.

I was introduced to LifeSavers by a parent who had seen the resources used at another school. Once I reached out to the team it was really easy to get involved and start accessing the resources for free. Paul from the LifeSavers team came out to train us on how to use the resources. It meant a lot to us that the resources were ready and accessible, and free! It’s hard for small schools like us because we can’t afford paid schemes for every subject. Financial education isn’t always prioritised because it’s not a key part of the curriculum or the Standard Assessment Tests (SATs) requirements.

We wanted more financial education because we believe in empowering our pupils and support them to develop a growth mindset at our school. We want the children to be ready for the future and that means learning relevant skills. It also means building their confidence to work independently and to build resilience, learning to embrace mistakes as learning opportunities.

I remember observing the salary sorting activity, where the children sort jobs in order from highest salary to lowest salary. Many didn’t understand that some jobs pay more money and why that might be. Some thought teachers were millionaires! It opened a lot of discussions between children about what is most important to them, the salary amount or whether they are happy doing that job.

The children are really engaged because we have introduced ‘The Big Picture’ – why these topics/skills will be important to them later in life. It’s helped them think carefully about the money they do have, that they don’t always have to spend it all. And that’s what’s changed.

I also now have children who say they want to give their money to other people, now they understand that some people have more money than others. These discussions never took place before LifeSavers.