The Chair of the All Party Parliamentary Group on Financial Education for Young People, Suella Fernandes MP, has spoken out at the shocking lack of effective financial education in UK schools, despite financial literacy being included in the National Curriculum since 2014.
A recent study, undertaken by the All Party Group, showed that over 70% of school students leave whole time education without ever having received a lesson in personal financial education.
It seems that our young people are growing up more financially illiterate, but at the same time more exposed to the opportunities to use money than any previous generation, chiefly via the widespread and poorly regulated access to credit.
The All Party report went on to say that four in ten adults are not in control of their personal finances. Two in five adults have no long term assets to their names, and that includes either property or a pension, and, perhaps most staggering of all, that over 21 million families have savings of less than £500!
The All Party Group has made two important recommendations, supported by the findings of its report.
The first is that The Department for Education must strengthen the position of financial education in the curriculum, by providing the specialist training necessary to enable teachers to deliver relevant lessons.
Second, that schools must be held to account - and that can be by OFSTED in the first instance and also by regional schools commissioners and parents - on whether they are delivering effective financial education to all their students.
It is now abundantly clear that delivering effective financial education to every school student in the UK is a national priority.
In all the years we (Keep the Cash!) have been beavering away in this market, we have made a number of crucial discoveries. The most significant and each of them has emerged as a result of delivering it to groups of students in every kind of school, in every part of the UK, is that we have to be clear about what we mean by financial education. And to make it more than a series of platitudes about the importance of saving, or the need for greater prudence, or some general observations on how to be an efficient consumer by choosing the best products on the marketplace.
In order to equip every student with the skills they need to be a solvent and independent adult they have to be educated in all the relevant building blocks of the four critical issues with which they will each have a life long relationship - employment, finance, property and the state as tax paying citizens.
We can achieve this through our planned programme of experiential learning called Keep the Cash!, and the next phase our our development is to produce a version that can be delivered in every school as part of the day to day learning that each student experiences, just as the All Party Group has suggested.
If we get this right, and use all the tools we have in the Keep the Cash! learning method, we will bring forth a generation of financially literate adults, who will make the right decisions about all the essential and practical matters they have to encounter, and then deal with on their way to living independently.
Lets get started!
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