The Generation €uro Students’ Award is aimed at upper secondary school students. The competition consists of three rounds. At the beginning of the school year, an on-line quiz on the competition website settled the initial selection: 30 questions about the ECB, the single currency and monetary policy drawn at random from a pool of 100, and classified into three difficulty levels.

The 20 best francophone teams and the same number of Flemish teams were invited into the second round. This time, the contestants had to put forward and defend a monetary policy decision, in less than 2 000 words. Quite a challenge considering the vast amount of information that has to be gathered and interpreted in order to carry out the same kind of exercise as the ECB Governing Council does each month. Only about ten French-speaking and ten Flemish teams got to the final of this test. Among them, 5 teams of each language were chosen to go through to the finals, which were held within the walls of the National Bank before a specialist panel of judges including, on the French-speaking side, the famous journalist Michel Visart. This year’s winners are a team of French-speaking schoolchildren from the Institut St Joseph in Ciney and a team hailing from St Jozefscollege in Herentals.

The Frankfurt event brought together all the winning teams from the 12 countries that took part in the contest, who were congratulated heartily by Mario Draghi and his Governing Council colleagues. It was no doubt an un unforgettable experience.

In September, the fifth edition of this competition will be kicked off. All the necessary information can be obtained by e-mail from: [email protected].