We need your thoughts on Finance lessons being dropped from Schools Bill

Geometry you can learn at schol - it is your one opportunity. no-one out there is going to try to make you interested in it when you leave school.

financial products on the other hand, you will be exposed to fairly shortly after school - people will try and make you interested in them, i think it is the responsibiliy of those same people to point out the downsides (and the law is clear on this point, but in some cases has not been enforced well enough)

PHSE total utter waste of time.

i think the only thing they could usefully give more education is sex education, paricularly in relation to STDs (one lesson was not enough) as you can't expect parents to have the scientific knowledge to inform kids about this accurately. But you could put this on the biology curriculum.

finance is not something to be taught in schools, as it is the kind of life skill that is, well, learned from life....and from your parents. also anyone selling a financial product is already obliged by law to make potential consequences clear to the buyer - this responsibility should be made clearer perhaps.

13 years of nu-lab and children can't read or know that if you subtract a big number from a small one, you get a negative.

Bring on the Tories, please,

*already know it = already know them

To those who say it is the job of the parents to educate their children about finance:

How on earth do you expect us ever to solve the problem by just blithely stating what 'should' be happening, rather than dealing with the situation in hand? Like it or not, children are not being taught financial management skills at home- are you really advocating that we withhold essential life skills from these children because they should already know it?

Would you refuse to teach a 13 yr old child to read on the basis that they should be able to do it already, or that someone else should have taught them? Why is this different?

Teaching finance in school will equip an entire generation with the skills to teach their children about finance. It will only take one generation to embed.
It's far too late to teach parents about finance now and expect them to pass it on to their children; teaching children is a far more cost effective method.

Actually, with things like APR and overall regulation, it is much easier to compare financial products than in the old days.

I don't buy the 'no one told me' argument. Are people really under the illusion that it isn't someoen else's money when you run up debt?

Caveat Emptor.

we might have access to more info but these days we also have more access to lies advertising. it's increasingly harder to decode the small print etc, naive youngsters (hark at me, I'm only 23 lol) need to know how much they are being manipulated by sneaky wording etc.

Finance can be taught with English Literature. As M r Micawber says in David Copperfield Income 20s Expenditure 19&6 equals happiness. Income 20s, Expenditure 20s &6 equals misery (or words to that effect).

The school timetable appears to be crammed to overflowing so something has to give.

Those saying it's up to the parents-
My parents never had a mortgage. The idea of rent was pretty simple for me to understand. I never had a mortgage explained to me.
Nor did my parents have loans or credit card debt.
I am only 26 and tbh have had no financial education and a hell of a lot of debt directly caused by going to university, which failed to get me a highly paid job as the government sent practically all of my generation to university, so my degree may as well be written on toilet paper. Is my debt caused by lack of education? I would say definately yes, as if the student loan had been properly explained to me, I would have thought twice, I really would have done.

We never had any kind of financial training at my school. I left the sixth form in 2003, so not that long ago. I do wonder if it's because it was a private school though?
I do think we need to educate our children about real life. Bring cookery back into the classroom for a start. I'll never forget, aged 18, asking my dad how I was meant to write a cheque. His face was liek this . I never knew what a mortgage was (parents were lifelong renters) or how to deal with credit cards (ie don't apply for one in the first place). I went off to university with no comprehension of the debt I was getting myself into, and have had trouble with my finances ever since.

It's time we stopped wanking around in schools and teaching things we need our young adults to learn that are going to directly impact on their lives- I remember struggling for months with various geometry which has never even come into my life, time which could have been better spent actually giving me some life skills. I know that had I been taught the basics of finance, it would have prevented me getting in a huge financial hole in my early twenties

Learning isn't restricted to school, you know. You can keep on learning afterwards, even if not in education. I am pretty sure I have learned more about life after leaving formal education. It's easier now, with unlimited resources, literally, at one's fingertips.

I would wager that a 14/15 year old does not need to understand the concept of APR because they are many years away from ever needing to know. Once they have decided they need to take out a loan, they can find out everything there is to know about APR.

I do agree with Lewis - I wish I had had some financial education at school, and I wish that the financial education my older DCs (now 22 & 20) presumably recieved had been of better quality. Because really they seem to be as clueless as I was at their age, but with a hell of a lot more student debt.

It doesn't have to be about values - I agree that should come from the home - but more specific stuff - what does APR mean? How is it calculated? What's an ISA? What's a base rate? etc. Stuff that might sound like the bleeding obvious but really isn't when you're fresh out of sixth form.

No, it is not the school's role.

It is up to the parents to tell their whingeing children, "no, you can't have that". The big problem is that "I want" gets, and it starts from the toddler tantrum times, and gets worse.

If you always have the policy of saying "no" to your children we can't afford it/it's not your birthday/it's not Christmas, then they grow up with appropriate expectations.

If they do want something, then get them to cut the grass, wash the car, etc. Teach them to earn the money first.

And when you want to give them a treat, they really appreciate it. They look after their possessions and don't vandalise them because it is not easy come: easy go.

Let the school's role be limited to maths lessons and sixth form enrichment. But don't expect the school to teach them values - that is the parents' role.

If children don't get it, then it is the parenting that needs to be tackled, not the children's education.

blimey i had no idea that financial lessons were in the curriculum in the first place.

is there any evidence that children who have had financial lessons at school retain and apply any of the information?

Completely agree with Martin Lewis on this and have thought for a long time that it needs to be something that is taught in schools.

I agree - leave the schools alone. Let's run a mile from this nanny state.

I used to facilitate parenting classes when I was a SAHM, and the agenda was never to impose on set of rules on the new parents. It was all about informed choice.

Loving all the smug talk of "the parents should do that"!. as if most of british parents are in a position to teach financial management to their offspring

and no i am not just talking of the less educated, less wealthy families but of the debt-bingeing middle class who mortgaged through the hilt during the last 10 years (and then blamed the banks for lending all the money and ending up in the mess we are now). In fact, i believe research has shown that poorer households are on balance much better at managing money than wealthier ones.

Financially capable citizens are a fundamental pillar of a well fucntioning financial system, and, by consequence, of a well fucntioning economy and society.

what happened to the national strategy for financial capability, anyway?

OF COURSE, 90% of financial management boils down to being able to do some basic maths, so that should be the priority....

I agree with Custardo. The parents should teach this. Teachers and schools are being expected to do waaaaaaaaaaaaaay too much these days, and then get a bollocking for doing it.

Teachers should not be expected to teach children about how to become responsible adults; their parents should do that.

A handful of finance lessons, however well delivered, will not make a blind bit of difference anyway. All the sex-ed in the world doesn't seem to make much difference to the teen pregnancy rates, nor do the lessons on drink and drugs stop the kids doing them every weekend.

We need to stop people getting into vast amounts of debt in the first place. A good start would be for legislation to make it much, much tougher to get a credit card / store card or HP in the first place.

universal parenting classes on reciept of child benefit is the way to go.

oh yes, there's such concensus on the correct way to parent that setting the curriculum for that would be a doddle.

"We should be teaching basics like boiling eggs, making spag bol, washing instructions, and how to pay stuff - and consequences if we don't and how to get out of the shit money wise. "

that's a parents job

educate the parents ffs. i keep banging and banging on about this - but it is WRONG WRONG WRONG to parent by proxy through schools.

please keep schools the institutions which teach our children traditional academic subjects.

if we are a society which needs to parent via ourschool system there is something seriously wrong with it.

universal parenting classes on reciept of child benefit is the way to go.

to many children leave the school system without even the basic skill to read more than a page or simple maths.

make all our children, children who have basic numeracy and literacy before they leave the school system and leave the bloody teachers alone and let them get on with it.

stop wasting public money on this kind of farce and direct more into the education system.

This is taught to a certain extent in Year 9 through something called the Real Game that looks at the world of work and budgeting.

You have to aim this one carefully (finance lessons I mean). I taught the same lessons (not the Real Game but off timetable lessons o this) to year 10s and 11s. The year 11s were more interested. The resources we were given were awful, so I asked what the kids were interested in; did they know how to budget? did they know how to read a pay statement?; were they aware of different tariffs for utilities?; how much would they pay in CTAX? what did they know about overdrafts?

We covered all of this, and I rammed home the importance of a pension as well. I showed them my payslip and explained about tax and NI. I explained mortgages, interest only and repayment, and was honest with them about some of the pratfalls I have had. I also explained in minute detail how much a child costs.

They listened because I was the same age as, or older than, their Mums, and I'd had LBT (life before teaching).

It was interesting what they did and didn't know.