Navigating Numbers: Exploring Economics

Exploring Economics is a new series of lesson plans and toolkits that form part of our Navigating Numbers education programme. Linked to the curriculum in England and Wales, we’ve designed these resources to make students aged 16 and over more aware of what we do at the Office for National Statistics (ONS).

Focusing on the importance of economic statistics, they allow your students to work confidently with real-world ONS data, building their statistical and data literacy skills.

You can use these new resources to support Economics, Business Studies and Geography lessons, and also adapt them for use in other subjects.

For each of the three subjects we’ve created a:

• teacher guide that gives an overview of the tasks and lesson plans

• presentation pack to run students through each stage of the project

• student toolkit with notes to support completing the tasks and questions

Using these curriculum-linked resources, you can help your students as they analyse, question and apply data to practical issues, helping them develop important critical thinking skills.

This toolkit helps Economics students understand how the performance of the UK economy is measured. Students can use existing ONS tools like the Explore local statistics tool and data from the Consumer Prices Index including owner occupiers’ housing costs (CPIH) dataset. These will help them to look at trends and learn how these trends affect real incomes.

Resources

Download the Economics student toolkit

Download the Economics presentation pack

Download the Economics teacher guide

This toolkit explores how population and demographics affect business planning and decision making. Business Studies students can use the Create a custom dataset tool and our population estimates datasets. These will help them to look at how demographics affect consumer demand and labour supply in the UK.

Resources

Download the Business Studies student toolkit

Download the Business Studies presentation pack

Download the Business Studies teacher guide

This toolkit explores how economic change can impact a student’s local area as well as decisions about local, regional and national services. Geography students can use datasets from the Explore local statistics and Build a custom area profile tools. These will help them to develop their analytical skills and learn how to interpret geolocated data.

Resources

Download the Geography student toolkit

Download the Geography presentation pack

Download the Geography teacher guide

We’ve also created five more Navigating Numbers toolkits that focus on different ONS tools and datasets. These toolkits cover:

• Gender pay gap
• Inflation
• Census
• Health and well-being
• Business, industry and trade

Download our five free classroom toolkits