Ben Broadbent: Financial education and the Bank of England

Speech by Mr Ben Broadbent, Deputy Governor for Monetary Policy of the Bank of England, at the "Helping children and young people learn about money" conference, London, 3 July 2019.

The views expressed in this speech are those of the speaker and not the view of the BIS.

Welcome

Hello and thank you for asking me along today. These are very important issues and I'm grateful to be able to talk to you. My purpose today is to set out a few things we've been doing at the Bank to help schools with economics education.

Some of this, I should say, is self-interested. Over time, we benefit from having a large and diverse pool of well trained economists who might consider working for us. The same is true of many other institutions. More significantly, public understanding of what the Bank of England is for, and what it does, is very important. It matters because it is the general public that constitute our ultimate and most important stakeholders. Although the public already hold us to account via parliament, it's important that we can explain ourselves, and in turn listen to people's concerns, people, more directly. (I have to concede that, important though they are, not everyone in the country is glued to his or her TV screen watching parliamentary hearings on the most recent monetary policy decisions.)