Don’t leave the future lives of so many of our young people to chance

The Money Advice Service - a government funded organisation that provides advice on money matters - has said that teenagers desperately need “last minute” financial education before adulthood, as fears are growing that they are spectacularly ill-prepared for life in the adult world of independent financial decision making.

One frightening observation made in the course of this latest comment from the Money Advice Service, is that one third of 16-17 year olds have never put money into a bank account. Two thirds of the same group cannot read a simple pay slip, but they are all only months away from being able to access credit!

The Money Advice Service commissioned 5,000 young people, with a further set of questions directed at their parents: the results are stark.

Parents are often not the best people to give any kind of guidance to their children about money management, because in far too many cases the parents themselves could do with some structured financial education. Half of the parents surveyed did not save regularly and over 44% of them admitted that they did not feel confident about their own money management skills.

This is merely the latest addition to a growing body of compelling evidence that demonstrates the urgent need for planned and professional financial education in schools. The pitfalls of debt and lives ruined by its consequences is nothing short of a national emergency, and it is not acceptable that we potter along on our present course, where in most schools there is no good quality provision for financial education, despite the fact that it has been on the national curriculum since 2014.

It is not sensible or educationally valid to hive off certain bits of personal financial education.

The chief reason for the lack of high quality, uniform provision is that most teachers do not have access to good quality material from which to teach what is a complex and diverse set of interconnected subjects - debt, credit, income, tax, budgeting skills, pay-day-lending, planning and forecasting, employment, property and all the rest.

It is not sensible or educationally valid to hive off certain bits of this topic and try and ram them down students’ throats in the mistaken belief that a few classes on debt and saving will be the making of them. It is a much bigger issue than that and what each student needs is a carefully planned programme of education, throughout their school career, which is maintained and kept up to speed as it must reflect the changes in the way our financial systems work, and equip students to deal with real problems.

We are developing a set of teaching resources that schools can use to achieve the creation of a financially literate student , one who can face the adult world with confidence and not trepidation. We are going to launch these resources by the summer of 2017 and make them available, on a licence basis, to every school in the country. That will be the first and most practical step we can take to making sure we don’t leave the future lives of so many of our young people to chance.