You could see this initiative as helping to meet citizens’ self-expressed desire for firmer educational foundations on all matters economic and financial. To help dig the footings of that foundation, the Bank will be visiting around 200 schools this year to give talks and lectures using its newly-enlisted ambassador army, some with the help of our partner, the charity Speakers for Schools. The Bank also now runs two schools competitions, the most recent announced just last week in partnership with the Financial Times. 11  The most significant of the Bank’s educational initiatives will take place in the classroom itself. We have developed, in conjunction with We Are Futures, classroom materials for use in the Personal, Social, Health and Economics (PSHE) component of the curriculum. We have involved and consulted teachers in designing and refining these materials. They will be rolled-out in schools from 27 April. The Bank would like to see PSHE and, within that, economics become a compulsory part of the curriculum, echoing the views of parents and pupils. I have recently written to the Department of Education to say that. 12  (c) Regional Tours  A third strand is regional engagement. The Bank has had, for the past 90 years, a network of regional Agencies dotted across the UK. 13  They are the Bank’s eyes and ears, playing a key role in collecting  intelligence on the economy and financial system, largely from companies. That intelligence feeds directly into the Bank’s policy deliberations.

This is, for the Bank, the next rung in our ascent of the engagement ladder. I am confident our view of the economy, and our setting of economic policy, will be greatly enhanced by this wider panorama. It will give 9  All speeches are available online at www.bankofengland.co.uk/speeches  9  the Bank a new lens on the economy’s hidden corners, a new set of often-quieter voices to listen to and learn from. It is an example of what the Bank, and I hope others, will be doing much more of over the period ahead: listening to a much wider audience, digesting their narratives, and then using this information to support the economy and the citizen stakeholders that make it up. 10  All speeches are available online at www.bankofengland.co.uk/speeches  10  References  Arnstein, S (1969), ‘A Ladder of Citizen Participation’, Journal of the American Planning Association, Vol. 35, No. 4, pp. 216-224. Botsman, R (2017), Who Can You Trust? How Technology Brought Us Together – and Why It Could Drive Us Apart, Portfolio Penguin. England, D, Hebden, A, Henderson, T and Pattie, T (2015), ‘The Agencies and ‘One Bank’’, Bank of England Quarterly Bulletin, 2015 Q1. Geertz, C (1998), ‘Deep Hanging Out’, The New York Review of Books, 22 October 1998 Haldane, A (2017a), ‘Everyday Economics’, speech available at https://www.bankofengland.co.uk/speech/2017/andy-haldane-speech-during-regional-visit Haldane, A (2017b), ‘A Little More Conversation A Little Less Action’, speech available at https://www.bankofengland.co.uk/speech/2017/a-little-more-conversation-a-little-less-action Haldane, A and Turrell, A (2017), ‘An interdisciplinary model for macroeconomics’, Oxford Review of Economic Policy, Vol.