Knowing how to manage your money is an essential life skill.
But it’s a subject where we, as a country, have too often expected people to fend for themselves or rely on what they might have picked up from their parents.
This makes financial education an outlier when we look at society’s approach to tackling similarly worthy subjects such as careers, digital skills or sex and relationships, even though a grounding in all of these is needed to help adolescents transition to an independent, happy adulthood.
Since 2014, after much campaigning by backbench MPs including myself, financial education has ostensibly been part of the national curriculum through citizenship, with a small amount of content taught in maths.
The importance of financial literacy
However, free schools and academies, which make up the majority of secondary schools, are able to opt out of the national curriculum.
And as only a small proportion of students take GCSE citizenship, there are widespread concerns that few choose to teach the financial content within the national curriculum.
It can appear in personal, social, health and economic education, but this is also a subject that suffers from a squeeze when schools are pressed to accommodate exams.
Financial education’s position in schools’ lists of priorities is therefore uncertain and its take-up is patchy at best, leaving an inequitable picture across the country.
Despite this, we send 18-year-olds off to university with student loans, maintenance grants and overdrafts.
We encourage teenagers to get part-time work, rightly, without explaining what is included in a payslip, and to enter into long contracts to pay for their smartphones.
A new generation of companies offering credit deals with slick branding are now plugged into the checkout pages of online fashion retailers. Their target audience? Young people whose understanding of managing interest on a debt will be limited at best.
The skills to manage money
In those schools where financial education is absent, children whose parents or guardians lack the time or the know-how to teach them about these intimidating concepts are at an obvious disadvantage. Missing out on this information may well affect people’s decision making for years to come.
That is why my cross-party colleagues on the Education Committee agreed that an inquiry into this subject is deserved, not just to bang the drum for its importance but to look for practical solutions to problems that stand in the way of schools feeling empowered to deliver financial education.
High on the list will be the education sector’s understandable weariness at taking on yet another demand - something we will be keen to avoid by thinking creatively and working with the sector to look at how strengthening provision can be achieved sustainably.
Two-thirds of teachers said they didn’t have the time or resources to squeeze financial education into the school year, according to a Teacher Tapp survey commissioned by the Bank of England in 2022.
Meanwhile, the education charity MyBnk previously carried out research that showed 43 per cent of girls and young women aged between 11 and 25 were not financially confident, while the figure for boys and young men was 61 per cent.
The Centre for Social Justice recently found that two-thirds of young adults who experienced financial difficulties believed better financial education could have helped them.
A place in the maths curriculum?
Another angle that my committee wants to explore is how effectively financial education could be slotted into the maths curriculum, both at primary and secondary level.
There is reason to think it could provide a means of illustrating to children the real-life applications of mathematics, a subject many struggle with or don’t feel is relevant to their lives.
And following the prime minister’s ambition to ensure that all 16- to 18-year-olds study “a form” of maths, we will examine whether specific content in financial education could be part of the offer provided to this age group.
High-quality financial education in schools requires the right materials, the right support for teachers and the right amount of space and time in a crowded curriculum. Getting it right could make a big difference to life chances.
Robin Walker is chair of the Commons Education Select Committee and former minister for school standards
