City Pay it Forward

City Pay it Forward is a charity that works with schools to teach students the basics in financial literacy. It was started some years ago by a group of civically-minded senior business professionals who decided to use their experience as parents and their knowledge as finance professionals to fill a gap in the curriculum. The aim is to help address some of the issues of youth indebtedness by educating younger generations around financial literacy topics and to make sure that good financial habits are developed early on in life.

Primary School Year 6 Curriculum published in early 2020

After lengthy collaboration with leading educators and interactions with over 15,000 students at over 150 schools across the country, we created and published a comprehensive, standalone financial literacy curriculum for year 6 students.

The City Pay it Forward Year 6 financial literacy curriculum comprises four parts:

• a Teacher’s Manual
• PowerPoint presentations
• videos
• teacher’s notes

It has been peer-reviewed and benefits from the Young Money Quality Mark.

With sponsorship from City firms and together with Rising Stars, a leading primary school publisher, we delivered the curriculum, free of charge, to all 21,000 primary schools in the UK. The reception from schools and teachers has been very positive and has led to many other related initiatives. The materials are all available free of charge on our website.

Initiatives since lockdown:

• Parents’ use of financial literacy materials for home-schooling: we have widely distributed our materials to parents for use in home schooling, through a variety of channels.
• London Stock Exchange: we are delighted to partner with the London Stock Exchange and our materials are freely available on their website, thereby reaching an increasingly wider audience and helping to promote financial literacy throughout lockdown. The LSE promoted our curriculum to all of their followers as part of their campaign and our materials were used in an FT Weekend Personal Finance supplement. City Pay it Forward appeared in a video for their virtual market open in October as part of a global “Ring the Bell for Financial Literacy” programme.
• Portsmouth City Council– We have partnered with Portsmouth City Council who have actively engaged with all of the primary schools in their area to undertake financial literacy education using our materials for the 2020-2021 school year. We have hosted Webinars to go through the materials with the schools involved.
• Award– We won an award for our curriculum from Teach Company and CPIF has featured in their Awards supplement that has a wide readership amongst schools and teachers
• Online teaching sessions – We have very successfully continued to present our Financial Education materials to primary school children using Google Classroom, to both small and larger groups of pupils.

Secondary School Investment Competitions and Work Experience

Our primary school materials are complemented by the work we do in secondary schools exploring topics in investing, enterprise and financial markets. Our workshops with students aged 16-18 include investment competitions, the latest of which involved more than 1,000 year 10 students across multiple schools.

Together with our Sponsors and other financial firms, we provide work experience programmes for students from the schools we work with.

Collaboration

We provide everything we do at City Pay it Forward free of charge. We are driven by our single-minded passion to make an impact in our community, amongst students and young people. We depend very strongly on collaborating with like-minded, entrepreneurial partners to help us expand the reach of our programmes and are always looking for ways to work with new organisations.