In 2019, Nobel prize winner Stephen Chu famously compared the world economy to an unsustainable pyramid scheme rigged against the young.

Everyone knew it, he said, but no one was talking about it.

Although teachers tend to be intelligent, well-rounded and progressive, their voices are locked out of this key debate because they are also - like most people - macroeconomically illiterate. 

But in the era of curriculum supremacy, where “powerful knowledge” reigns, our failure to teach the basic principles of how a modern economy works is a troubling omission that undermines the prospect of social mobility for all children.

The social mobility sham

Conventional capitalism has had its detractors but in terms of longevity and the stability of modern western democracy, even the slenderest belief in social mobility meant that it worked for centuries. Until now. 

But within a millennial’s lifespan, decades of deregulation have created a new form of turbo-charged capitalism which has redirected wealth towards the older, propertied and pensioned generation and away from an indebted younger generation, who are deprived of asset ownership.

Impoverished young people might not seem like rich pickings but financial lenders compete furiously for their business because they know that their drawn-out interest repayments translate into lucrative assets on a long-term balance sheet.

My teaching career coincided with an era when credit cards became the most aggressively marketed financial product in history and I could see their devastating effects on vulnerable families first-hand. 

The vicious cycle of credit

When the cost of living became an affordability crisis and credit was used just to make ends meet, families found themselves trapped in a vicious circle of involuntary servitude.

But perhaps the most significant blow to the social mobility prospects of the working-class children I taught was the tripling of tuition fees in 2010 followed by the cancellation of Education Maintenance Allowance (EMA) payments.

Both sent the insidiously normalising message that aspiration was prohibitively expensive.

So when schools eventually reconvene in the midst of this economic crisis, let’s take Stephen Chu’s advice and, in the interests of financial safeguarding, teach children how pyramid schemes really work. 

Essentially, they require participants to pay now and defer pleasure in the present moment in the hope of future reward.

The school pyramid

Fortunately, we don’t have to look far for a working microcosmic model: a diagrammatic tree of the school’s own hierarchy will serve nicely.

From the narrow tip of the senior leadership team, down through tiers of middle management, broadening into the main body of the teaching staff and then on through the sixth form before finally flaring out into real ballast of the school’s general population, the principle is always the same: work hard, prove yourself as compliant and you will advance.

That’s why teaching has an enviably simple and stabilising model for professional development that replicates society’s broadly meritocratic values.

If, like me, you’re a teacher of a certain age, you may remember this model with nostalgia because it reminds you of your own schooling and explains your own modestly successful career.

But perhaps it’s time to admit that, beyond the school gates, wider society is geared around a social mobility mechanism that no longer operates.

But even when tuition fees, unaffordable housing, in-work poverty and the normalisation of food banks exposed social mobility as a quaint, 20th-century anachronism, senior leaders like myself were still trying to use it as a galvanising rallying cry.

And then the pandemic hit….

Preparing for reality

In the current climate, continuing to bang the social mobility drum would be disingenuous in the extreme.

For now, though, we still buy into the sales pitch. How long can this last? Or, perhaps just as pressing, why does it persist?

Perhaps our tacit complicity with the pyramid scheme stems from an even more inconvenient truth that we’d prefer not to acknowledge: as teachers, we’re a little too well insulated from economic downturns and the predatory pitfalls faced by young people as they enter the real economy.

In fact, financial guru Martin Lewis believes that dedicated financial teacher training is key if schools are to boost their pupils’ financial literacy.

In 2018, frustrated by government inaction, he co-launched a textbook with Young Money called Your Money Matters and insisted that schools needed to go so much further in building financial acumen, especially in the key skills of bias training, debt avoidance and budget management.

Given recent events, not only does Your Money Matters need to be funded as a set text for all secondary students, and placed at the heart of schools’ curriculum offer, but, more significantly, financial literacy needs to be regarded as a discrete strand of safeguarding.

After all, while the time students have lost in school is a major concern around how it will impact on their future opportunities, the fact they will soon enter a world of huge financial uncertainty suggests that having an insight into basic fiscal facts would be a useful tool, perhaps.

Sean Smith is a former vice principal and freelance education journalist