Majority of young people don't know financial education is on the curriculum

Think back to your school days – how much did you learn about personal finance: mortgages, credit cards and loans?

Before 2014, this information didn't form part of the national curriculum, so understandably the answer for many might be that they didn't learn very much.

Going back a decade, I was still at school and therefore should have been on the receiving end of some of this education, albeit in its early days.

Many of the things I learned at school have stuck with me over the past ten years, most of which don't generally apply to my daily life, be it the science behind the polarisation of light waves or the plots made against Elizabeth I (Ridolfi, Throckmorton, Babington… they still roll off the tongue).

What didn't stick with me was anything related to borrowing money, tax or paying into a pension.

This is not to say that I didn't learn about these things, I probably did. But I would venture that financial education didn't constitute a significant enough part of my education for me to remember it.

Speaking to a few school friends, it seems no one else remembered being taught any of that either.

Data from Boon Brokers also indicates that I might not be alone.

Some 74 per cent of young people said they didn't know financial literacy was part of the curriculum, according to the study of 1,000 people aged between 18 and 24.

As a result, some 83 per cent said school wasn't their main source of financial education, with 39 per cent of them saying their parents provided most of their financial knowledge.

Giang Hughes, business support manager at wealth management consultancy firm Simplify Consulting: 'Financial education is an essential life skill.

'While the statistics are shocking, they are not surprising, and change needs to be made to the curriculum so children can become more financially literate as they enter adulthood.

'We already see a huge advice gap that is yet to be reduced in a meaningful way and many reports suggest young adults are seeking advice from unregulated, uninformed and sometimes questionable sources.'

The biggest knowledge gap appears to arise around mortgages with 58 per cent saying no facilities were provided at school for them to learn about mortgages.

Some 92 per cent said they want mortgages to be taught in schools.

'These figures only highlight the need for formal financial education in schools and collectively we urge the Government to make financial education a compulsory part of every child's school day, regardless of which school they attend,' Hughes adds.

Liam Hussey, head of PSHE at Ormiston Bolingbroke Academy in Cheshire, runs his school's financial literacy programme and doesn't think the National Curriculum goes far enough.

He told This is Money: 'Quite often PSHE in schools is a bit of a bolt on, it seems a poisoned chalice that no one wants. My vision when I first presented it to the senior leadership team and the head teacher was that I wanted to rip it up and start again.'

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That's what he did.

'Coming from a business studies background, [money] was a more important topic to me.'

Hussey built a programme for students that could then be adapted by other teachers to suit the needs of their particular class.

He said: 'I've developed these materials from scratch, it's taken a lot of time and effort to get those set up and to the standard that they need to be.'

Now at Ormiston, students learn about personal finance over six-week blocks, covering everything from mortgages and credit to banking and loan sharks, working through booklets with key definitions and real-life scenarios and tasks such as building a weekly budget.

The classes are tailored to specific year groups, with the year 11 teaching block building on year nine and year seven teaching.

Hussey said: 'It's a stand alone, dedicated project of at least six weeks where students go in depth with the same member of staff working on the same booklet and coming back to that knowledge week in week out.'

And the student response to the programme at Ormiston has been a positive one.

Hussey said: 'The engagement from students is something that has been really positive… It's so relevant for them and they respond so well.

'It's quite pleasing to know that they are taking it seriously, they need to understand the value of this part of the curriculum.'

Student response surveys at the school show that the money sections of PSHE are often the most favoured by the students.

Hussey said: 'Taxation, bills, money, jobs, careers, taxes and mortgages. You can see this is a common theme coming through, the demand is there.'

For all the financial education taking place at Ormiston though, other schools aren't hitting the same mark.

Hussey said: 'In some cases I've heard the situations where the learning outcomes are just given to staff and they have to develop their own materials, which for me creates a lot of issues about consistency and certainly about quality.'

'[Financial Literacy] is not as well implemented as it should be,' he said,

Hussey developed Ormiston's financial literacy content himself, spending hours painstakingly putting together lessons that can be adapted by other teachers for their classes.

But teachers are already stretched, and most simply don't have time to do the same, especially when financial education is often overlooked.

Hussey said: 'To produce those materials yourself takes a lot of time and a lot of effort.'

This means that standards vary wildly, and financial education is far from consistent.

'I think we need an awareness of the importance of financial to see and the expectation on schools to deliver,' Hussey added.

'We need a national bank of materials that we can tap into as teachers, so that you can go online, access a lesson on mortgages and decide which parts you want to keep or amend.'