The Third and Fourth Form stu­dents of St Joseph's Con­vent, San Fer­nan­do, beat out a stiff chal­lenge from sev­en oth­er top per­form­ing sec­ondary schools to win the Na­tion­al Fi­nan­cial Lit­er­a­cy Sec­ondary Schools Quiz 2011. In the process, the school not on­ly walked away with a chal­lenge tro­phy and many oth­er top prizes but al­so with brag­ging rights as the team with su­perla­tive knowl­edge of fi­nan­cial lit­er­a­cy. In sec­ond place was Na­pari­ma Girls High School with Ves­signy Sec­ondary, third, and North East­ern Col­lege in fourth. Oth­er schools par­tic­i­pat­ing in the event were AS­JA Girls Col­lege, Mir­a­cle Min­istries, Shi­va Boys Hin­du Col­lege and Par­vati Girls Hin­du Col­lege.

The com­pe­ti­tion was host­ed by the Na­tion­al Fi­nan­cial Lit­er­a­cy Pro­gramme (NFLP) of the Cen­tral Bank of Trinidad and To­ba­go and en­dorsed by the Min­istry of Ed­u­ca­tion. Speak­ing about the event Adri­an Saun­ders, as­sis­tant man­ag­er at NFLP, said: "We were in­deed very im­pressed with the per­for­mance of the stu­dents. Many had to over­come their ner­vous­ness per­form­ing in front of an au­di­ence in or­der to put their best ef­fort for­ward for their schools. "On top of that, it is close to end of term ex­ams for many of them, so they would have had to put a great in­vest­ment in­to study­ing for this quiz as well. We thank them for their dili­gence and their ded­i­ca­tion and we thank their teach­ers for tak­ing time to pre­pare them for the com­pe­ti­tion."

The semi­fi­nal and fi­nal com­pe­ti­tions were held at UTT's Acad­e­my for the Per­form­ing Arts. The top eight schools qual­i­fied af­ter re­ceiv­ing top marks in a writ­ten ex­am on March 23 at cen­tres across Trinidad and To­ba­go. At stake was a top prize of $5,000 cash for the school, plus $1,000 in units for each team mem­ber and $1,200 in units for the su­per­vis­ing teacher. The school plac­ing sec­ond re­ceived $3,000, $750 in units for the team mem­bers and $900 in units for the teacher. Third place re­ceived $1,000, plus $500 in units for the team mem­bers and $700 in units for the teacher. The top three teams were al­so award­ed medals and tro­phies.

The NFLP launched this com­pe­ti­tion to broad­en aware­ness among young peo­ple about the im­por­tance of fi­nan­cial lit­er­a­cy as well as to in­stil in them a pos­i­tive at­ti­tude to­wards mon­ey and fi­nances and al­so en­cour­age healthy fi­nan­cial prac­tices. Plans are in place to make this a reg­u­lar event of the schools cal­en­dar, tar­get­ing both stu­dents of the pri­ma­ry and sec­ondary schools. The NFLP last host­ed a pri­ma­ry schools quiz in 2008 and a sec­ondary schools chal­lenge in 2009.