Finance and Entrepreneurship Day at Builth Wells High School

Heading back to school doesn't have to be boring, as year ten and eleven Builth Wells High School pupils proved last Friday! 

Steam Powered Stories and the Learn and Grow team administered a Finance and Entrepreneurship Day where over 150 year ten and eleven pupils had the opportunity to talk directly to various employers about their jobs generally, and fore mostly, about how maths is used in their everyday working lives. 

Four employers kindly came along and spoke to every student, demonstrating how maths is used in their job roles and answered any questions pupils had.

• Maxine Day, Hairdresser  

• Builth Wells Police Service 

•       Builth Wells Health Service 

• Builth Wells Fire Service 

The event was hugely successful in changing pupil's attitudes towards numeracy, and to begin to obliterate the belief that maths you learn in school will never be used or needed in your working lives because as we all know- maths is used in every job role whether you are a hairdresser, a fireman, or even a farmer!  

To ensure our services are kept up to date, relevant, and the best they can be, during the event we conducted a questionnaire where pupils were asked to score from 1-3 how much maths they believed was needed in a variety of occupations. 

 After reviewing the evaluation forms, we discovered that 85 pupils thought that if you were a footballer you would not need maths. We were overwhelmed by the high percentage of pupils that believed this, and we are now working with more employers and businesses to assure that on our future Finance and Entrepreneurship workshops we have a footballer, or someone in the football profession that can attend and prove how they use maths.

We are also looking for employers in Builth Wells, Swansea, Neath, Carmarthenshire, and Pembrokeshire that work in the creative arts industry as from reviewing our feedback, we found that many pupils believed that to be a musician and a photographer you would not need maths.  

If you would like to get involved in the scheme, feel free to get involved with us by emailing us on steampoweredstories.janro@gmail.com, tweet us @SteamStories, or send us a message on Facebook.com/SteamPoweredStories 

Thanks to all employers that attended, we really appreciated your attendance and co-operation. To all pupils that took part, we hope you enjoyed the day, we look forward to working with you all in the future!