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“Young Factor” is an Osservatorio project that embraces a new civil and social challenge: improving the economic and financial literacy of Italian students and eliminating the competition gap between them and their European peers. In order to overcome the competitive spread within Europe and to launch this challenge, The Osservatorio has chosen new partners – three great banking institutions in Italy: Intesa Sanpaolo, Banca Monte dei Paschi di Siena, UBI Banca and UniCredit. The project sets out to offer different levels of economic and financial training, each tailored to the individual student in order to support their acquisition of new skills in this field and to ensure that these students increasingly become masters of their own lives. The “Young Factor” project is the final step in the citizenship training program that The Osservatorio began with the “The Quality Information in the Classroom” project.

Partnership

In order to attain economic and financial literacy for young Italian students, the Osservatorio Permanente Giovani-Editori is partnering with two main banking institutions: Intesa Sanpaolo and UniCredit will play an active role, as partners, in this new great social and civic challenge, which, apart from educating students to seek quality information, is aimed at ensuring that today’s young people will become tomorrow’s citizens capable of mastering their own mind and means. The two banks signed a Memorandum of Understanding with the Osservatorio and the document will later be open to all banking institutions who may wish to join the Osservatorio in achieving this economic and financial literacy goal.

Training

The teacher is the conduit by which the Osservatorio’s educational project can begin to take shape within a school context, passing our educational and civic aims onto their students. Teachers are constantly assisted in this task by a team of collaborators and a dedicated call centre that deals with responding, throughout the school year, to doubts and questions about the project.

Textbook

A textbook and accompanying worksheets are made available both teachers and students by a team of teachers and professors from the best Italian universities, who as well as authoring both the textbook and worksheets in association with the Osservatorio, have helped create 10 instructive videos as part of the project.

Research

The project is monitored by research conducted by, as with the ‘Quality Information in the Classroom’ initiative, experts from GfK Italia. This research helps assess the levels of satisfaction and level of learning in the financial education offered to both students and teachers

Meetings

Local meetings and debates with journalists and experts such as ‘Young Factor: a dialogue between young people, economics and finance’ or the various yearly project launches which have hosted authoritative and influential figures of the world of finance such as the ex-Governor of the ECB, Jean-Claude Trichet, the Governor of the Bundesbank, Jens Weidmann, or the Governor of the Central Bank of Holland, Klaas Knot.

The governors of the Bank of Spain, Luise Maria Linde, and the Governor of the Bank of France, Francois Villeroy de Galhau, were the protagonists instead of the 2016/2017 edition. During the 2017/2018 school year the protagonists were Ewald Nowotny (Governor of the Bank of Austria) and Jan Smets (Governor of the Bank of Belgium), for the initial meeting, and Carlos Costa (Governor Banca del Portogollo) for the closing meeting. For the 2018/2019 edition to inaugurate the initiative, Jens Weidmann, Klaas Knot and Ignazio Visco returned – together- to the Osservatorio’s stage. The 2019/2020 edition it was inaugurated by Pablo Hernandez De Cos, Central Bank Governor of Spain. All the meetings allow the students to have honest, frank and engaging discussions with national and international guests

The APP

This tool, created in partnership with UBI Banca, was created to bring economic-financial literacy to all classes involved in the initiative through a new, more immediate and innovative trail of ten articulated keywords in different didactic cards, a lot of news always updated on topics of pressing topicality, economic and otherwise, and different video lessons. The teacher can view, save as favorites and share with his colleagues, and with his students, all the teaching materials contained within the app. The teacher can also take advantage of a series of quizzes created ad hoc by a team of experts, within the ten words, and can also create their own multiple choice quizzes. After creating and saving the quiz, the teacher can immediately share it with their students. With the app, the teacher will also be able to enroll the class in the training days and events organized within the project and will be able to stay up to date on past events through detailed reports and photo galleries. In addition, through the QR Code reader, the teacher can access additional extra content.