Young Enterprise welcomes the findings and recommendations of the Education Select Committee which places a spotlight on the increasing importance of financial education for young people, and recognises that more needs to be done to improve how this essential topic is covered in schools and post-16 settings.
We are encouraged by the Committee’s findings which align with our own advocacy for a sustainable, teacher-led approach to financial education. By empowering teachers in this way, financial education can be embedded across education in a sustainable, low-cost and effective way so that all young people, regardless of where they live or learn, have opportunities to apply their learning about money in school, to their own lives, better preparing them for the future.
Teachers know their students best and are professionals in adapting materials to meet the needs of the young people they work with, but they face challenges in the time they have to prepare and deliver financial education to young people, and the lack of training they currently receive. Supporting teachers to deliver effective financial education across the curriculum is essential through quality resources, training and through prioritising it within the school.
We support the Committee’s call for financial education to be made a compulsory part of PSHE across both primary and secondary phases of education, regardless of school type, giving economic education the same weighting as relationships and health education.
This complements the Committee’s other recommendations for financial education to be more deeply embedded in maths to provide a solid foundation for financial literacy. By treating financial education as more than maths and making it a compulsory part of PSHE, this would help to ensure all young people are developing the all-important attitudes to risk and money management behaviours that are increasingly important in day-to-day life.
We agree with the Committee that financial education needs to be delivered across multiple subjects and that this should be supported by cross-curriculum Financial Education Leads in schools. For example, we know from our own Centres of Excellence programme, which supports and celebrates schools championing financial education across their teaching, the importance of a centralised member of staff to coordinate the rich array of supporting financial education initiatives – from teacher training, to programmes, to resources – across the school.
We support the call to make high-quality financial education teaching materials more readily available for teachers, with an emphasis on finding a solution that fits with teachers’ practical requirements and preferences. For example, a recent YouGov survey commissioned by Young Enterprise found that 87% of teachers think it is important that any centralised financial education resources should be independently quality assured.
Finally, we strongly support the Committee’s recommendation for UK nations to take part in the next OECD PISA financial literacy benchmarking exercise which represents an important step towards more consistent international measurement and increased profile.
About Young Enterprise
Young Enterprise is pleased to have been invited to submit oral evidence twice to the Committee’s inquiry, alongside founder of MoneySavingExpert.com Martin Lewis, who generously funded the development and distribution of the Young Enterprise ‘Your Money Matters’ textbooks, the widest-used financial education textbook in the UK.
We have been at the forefront of financial education for over 60 years, specialising in equipping teachers and educators to deliver financial education in both primary and secondary settings by developing high-quality tools and resources, teacher training and in-school mentoring and support for the topic of financial education.
Our enterprise and financial education programmes specialise in giving young people the opportunity to apply what they learn in school to real-world experience of developing and running a business, which provides a context for financial education and money management, particularly for those young people who do not have the opportunity or resource to engage with personal finance outside of school.
Young Enterprise is the Secretariat of the All-Party Parliamentary Group on Financial Education for Young People, which advocates for quality financial education for all young people, and the convenor of the Financial Education Forum, bringing together a variety of stakeholders involved in this topic.