Year 13 Economics Trip to London

News - Dec 3

In late November, an intrepid group of Year 13 Economics students, accompanied by Mr Stephan and Ms Rust, ran the gauntlet of the Southwestern Railway network to attend a conference in London.  

They heard from a fantastic range of speakers on a variety of topics, from the Marxist economist Grace Blakely, explaining the importance of examining economic problems through the lens of power differentials, to Mark Littlewood of the IEA – a free market thinktank – defending the Liz Truss mini-budget policies. Students also heard from Ed Balls, using a pivot of trade relations towards the EU away from the USA, as well as Madeleine Sumption, from Oxford University’s Migration Observatory, explaining the impacts of elevated net inward migration figures in a highly nuanced way.  

Tim Harford (of Radio 4.s ‘More or Less’ fame) humorously wove together the stories of two giants of economics – John Maynard Keynes and Irving Fisher – offering a salutary tale of keeping an open mind – which Keynes famously did. Mr Stephan was lucky enough to find himself sitting next to the environmental economist Kate Raworth (author of Doughnut Economics), who then asked him and Ms Rust to give feedback on her talk. In return, she gave our students a private Q&A session at the end of the conference, once the rest of the schools had left the building!  

All in all, this was a highly memorable and enriching experience for our Year 13 economists, giving them lots of fresh ideas and data to take into their final exams in May.