Schoolbook teaches kids to be savvy with money
It’s only money isn’t it? Well, no, actually. It’s far more important than that.
Money isn’t just a financial issue. Problems can infect every area of your life – your happiness, mental health, work, relationships and more.
For years, I was involved in the campaign to get financial education on the English national curriculum. We succeeded in 2014 and celebrated, thinking ‘job done’.
We were wrong. The Government put no resources in, and teachers weren’t taught how to teach it.
So last year, I thought enough was enough – and, working with the Young Money charity, we launched the first curriculum matched textbook, Your Money Matters.
In November we sent 340,000 free copies (plus teachers’ guides) to all English state schools.
WRESTLE
The textbook is aimed at students aged 15 to 16, and covers savings, budgeting, borrowing, student loans, identity theft and more.
It’s also available as a free PDF download from young-money. org.uk, so why not make it a New Year resolution to go through it with your kids (some adults tell me it’s also taught them a thing or two)?
I do still wrestle with whether it was right that a private individual should have had to fund this – yet there was no alternative, so I decided to let pragmatics outweigh my principles.
However launching the textbook isn’t enough. We need schools to teach it.
The growth of academies means less than half now follow the national curriculum.
So, parents, and grandparents, if you want your children to be tooled up to face the financial realities of life, why not have a polite word with teachers or the headmaster to find out what they’re doing with the textbook?
And urge them to give it the classroom time it needs.