Imagine You Are Finished with School? Will You Sink or Swim? - KuGompo Pupils Challenged

Give a teenager a salary, a set of life choices and a scoreboard and see what happens.

That was the premise of a sobering workshop at the University of Fort Hare’s East London campus last Saturday, where the South African Institute of Chartered Accountants (SAICA) helped grade 10 and 11 learners to explore financial literacy and ethical business practices.

Learners from Clarendon, Kingsridge, Hudson Park, De Vos Malan and Gonubie high schools spent 12 September doing something the school timetable rarely allows - making adult decisions and living with the results.

The day opened with Bulelani Magajana, SAICA’s Manager: Schools Capabilities and Endorsement, who set out the aims of their career awareness schools programme, financial literacy and access to the Thuthuka Bursary Fund. The message was clear: see yourselves as productive future professionals rather than spectators.

Professor Trust Chireka, Head of Accounting at Fort Hare, followed with a case for the profession. The practical detail came from Fort Hare lecturer Sisonke Tyobeka-Dapula CA(SA) and Zamamfusi Mdinyane CA(SA), Assistant Audit Manager at the Auditor-General of South Africa, mapped the route to becoming a Chartered Accountant.

Then the room got competitive.

The Intern CA(SA) game, facilitated by Fort Hare senior lecturer Lieketseng Motalingoane CA(SA), dropped each learner into the years after matric. Marks, income, savings, ethics, relationships, reputation and health. Every choice carried a consequence, and the consequences compounded.

The scoreboard taught the lesson better than any assembly-hall lecture could. Chasing marks at the cost of your health did not win. Chasing money at the cost of your ethics did not win. Balance won.

Along the way, pupils weighed risks against opportunities, learned how to stretch limited resources, and ran into the questions that ambush most first-year students: how to manage money without a safety net? Most importantly, how to conduct yourself professionally and explored how relationships and personal wellbeing hold up under pressure. Mentorship surfaced again and again as the thing that keeps young people afloat.

Learners were ranked at the end of the simulation, but the ranking was the smaller prize.

In a province where youth unemployment and the cost of studying weigh heavily on school-leavers, a Saturday spent rehearsing those decisions is no small thing. The workshop was never only a recruitment pitch for accounting. It gave a room full of teenagers a low-risk place to get their first big decisions wrong; and a clear understanding of the available bursaries and routes that could help them get the real ones right.