Hi everyone, we are on the final episode of Season 5 of the podcast. We are going to be taking a break over summer as we all have little kids that we are going to manically trying to wrangle during the summer holidays. We will be back in September with Season 6.

We have some super fun guests on our podcast episode today. Grace, Theodore, Sophia, Alexander, Kaydee, Kara and Zachary. The Cura Kids! It always stands out to me that the average reading age in the UK is that of a 9 year old. So does what we say to people and the documents that we give them make sense?

The kids range from age 4 to 12. I’ve done this specifically so that we get the older ones that are almost 8 through to 12, to give us a really good idea of how the average person views our terminology. The ones under 8 are here for, let’s face it, the cuteness factor.

This episode is not a super long one, I didn’t want to overwhelm the kids and there is a limit as to how much I could say insurance jargon to them without it getting super super boring. I made sure that I told them all how brilliant they were doing, that they had the brilliant job of being teachers for once, telling us adults where we are getting it wrong and being too confusing.

The key takeaways:

• The average reading age in the UK is that of a 9 year old, none of our guests were able to understand our technical jargon.
• The one thing that the kids got close to getting ‘right’ was what a policy lapsing means.
• That when we use terms like serious or critical illness the kids did wonder about cancer (included in CIC/SIC contracts) but they also thought covid too (not included in CIC/SIC contracts).

 I appreciate that this was not a scientific experiment but what I can share is that out of the older children taking part they are all familiar with very serious medical conditions in their close family members. As an example my dad has Parkinsons and isn’t particularly well, my children see him most days and they didn’t think of this when I asked them about critical or serious illnesses. Others have experienced close family members with cancers and strokes. Maybe sometimes when we experience something and we see people living with a condition or recovering from it it can become almost normalised, so we don’t then see it as something out of the ordinary. It brings an extra dynamic to wondering if the reason that critical illness and income protection is sold so much less than life insurance, is because some health conditions now feel as if they are part and parcel of life.

We are back in September for Season 6 of the podcast. I am so pleased with how the podcast is being seen as a useful resource by advisers. I even spoke with a compliance consultant recently who said that she’d heard of me because one of the firms she takes cares of uses us for their IDD CPD.

So far we are at:

• A bank over 52 hours CPD
• Over 6,000 unique listeners
• Over 13,000 downloads
• We’ve issued over 1,200 CPD certificates, that’s over 1,000 hours of CPD!

Remember, if you are listening to this as part of your work, you can claim a CPD certificate on our website, thanks to our sponsors Octo Members.

If you want to know more about how to arrange protection insurance, take a look at my Protection Insurance in Practice course here.