Oundle Economists through to National Finals of Bank of England Challenge

Published on isbi School News dated Tuesday 4th of March 2014

Having won the Regional heats back in December, a team of Oundle School Economists have made it through to the National Finals of the 'Bank of England Target 2.0 Challenge' following success at the recent Area finals. They are one of only 6 teams to do so out of a very strong field of 300 schools.

Head of Economics, Mo Tanweer commented, 'This is the first time Oundle has ever made it to the National Finals. The pupils have won £1,000 by doing this, with the top prize of £10,000 up for grabs in the Finals. The team of pupils presented very strongly and answered the panel's questions excellently. They should be rightly proud of their achievement.'

The Challenge requires pupils to act as the Monetary Policy Committee and submit their own proposal for the interest rate and the level of Quantitative Easing the Bank should adopt, in order to hit the 2.0% inflation target. It is judged by members of the actual Bank of England Monetary Policy Committee.

The presenting team comprised: Captain Oli Wood (17); Malayandi Palaniappan (19); Juliette Aliker (18) and Freddie Martin (18).

Oli commented, 'We had to undertake economic research and analysis by examining current economic conditions, and assessing the outlook for the economy and inflation. We then had to present our findings to a panel of judges in competition with other schools in the area and make a monetary policy recommendation with supporting arguments and evidence to achieve the Government's inflation target of 2.0%.

In our presentation we proposed to keep the Bank Rate at 0.5% and maintain the stock of QE asset purchases at £375, due to the fragile recovery in the UK and falling real wages.

It felt amazing to win as we had been working on the presentation for several months, with a very hectic couple of days before updating all of the data and statistics on the slides. It has given all of the team a much greater understanding of the current state of the UK economy and will definitely help us in our A-level studies.'