Martin Lewis: We need financial education in EVERY school for EVERY child

Martin: "The problem is very simple. Getting it [financial education] on the national curriculum had been the goal, but not long after, we got the academisation and free schools, which no longer have to follow the national curriculum. And it is now a minority of schools who legally have to follow the national curriculum.

"They just have to look at the national curriculum and take the guidance, but they don't have to follow it. And when you have strained budgets in schools, anything that you cannot teach, you don't teach, which is why it is a postcode lottery. And with the exception of the few Young Money Centres of Excellence out there, we have a poverty of financial education in our schools right now.

"So you had your report after ten years, and I'm always very thankful for the work that the Parliamentary Group does. But that again was a "no-shit-Sherlock" situation and I can take this further. I sat in – another name drop here – I sat in a meeting with Nick Gibb after three years, and I went in to say (he was the follow-up Schools Minister). We've got it on the National Curriculum, but that means many of the previous funders... and let me tell you, the last thing I want is to see branded banks inside schools.

"I hate school banks that have branded bank names, they should absolutely be banned. I love the funding by financial firms for financial education, but don't brand yourself in schools. We do not want brands. We do not want to try and buy pupils' loyalty for the rest of their life, to sign up to your brand by putting it in schools. So I don't want that.

"But the funding for financial education disappeared. So I went in to see and say: 'Look, we need resources, we need teacher training when they're learning to be teachers in the first case. And we need ongoing teacher training for all the teachers who haven't been taught to do this. So at least they can be a page ahead of the pupils.'

"We would ask them for that. I volunteered my time to speak at a conference, I said, 'You bring them together, I'll speak, we'll talk to them about it.' Because this all stemmed from a cash class I did years ago where I taught a group of 15-year-olds about money with their teachers at the back of the class, and they went home and saved their parents £5,500.

"But the person who saved the most money in the room was the teacher, who saved £2,000. This is real. It's practical. It changes lives. One of those pupils had a single mother who was a cleaner who was in financial trouble. He happened to be in the top set at maths at the school. He went home. He took over the family budget and revolutionised their lives.

"It is not a theoretical example in some cases. We did that, and we got to the point where Nick Gibb said to me, 'Yes, I agree, we need a textbook'. I said, 'Great, you need the textbook'. He said, 'We need the textbook'. I said, 'Great, you need a textbook'. He said, 'We need'... This conversation went on for a long time.

"It was a bit like the nodding dog that went on. I said, 'I don't understand what d'you mean. I'm happy to support you doing the textbook'. He said, 'No, you need to do a textbook'. It is fundamentally wrong that a private individual should fund a textbook on financial education for schools. It is against my political principles, but practically nobody else, and there was no other way it was going to happen, so I funded the textbook.

"We then went back to the government, I may as well tell this story there are some parliamentarians in there. And we said, 'I'm going to fund it being written, we've got a publisher'. 'No we haven't'. 'What?' 'Oh, no.' 'What?' 'Oh no, you can't have a publisher. We can't support you doing this if you're going to have a publisher, because the Department for Education cannot favour one publisher over another'.

"I said, 'But you said you needed a textbook. How are we going to do it without a publisher?'... 'Well, you'll need to'. 'I'll need to publish it?' So I funded to self-publish the textbook, which added noughts to the bill and thought, 'Screw it, screw it, we'll just do it. Let's get this done'.

"So we've got a textbook out there. Eventually seen by somebody who likes to save money in the [Money and] Pensions Service where we did the curriculum-mapped one for Wales, Scotland, Northern Ireland, [it] went 50/50 with the private individual who could have demanded his own agenda in the book. I signed up to editorial independence to make sure Young Money [the charity] didn't, but I could have demanded to have my agenda put into that book. That is wrong. That should not be happening in our society.

"We still don't have teacher training. We still don't have ongoing teacher training. We still have a textbook and not sufficient online resources. By the way I'm aware of many brilliant charities in this space who are doing everything they can to address that. But we want a universality and a level in every school for every pupil.

"The PPI mis-selling bill was £40 billion. One set of mis-selling, people were scammed out of £40 billion. Let's not talk about 10% of that. Let's not talk about 1% of that. Let's not talk about 0.1% of that. Let's talk about 0.05% of that one single mis-selling scandal, which would mean £20 million. Enough resources from the state could give us teacher training, could give us ongoing teacher training, and could give us a digital tool that would be able to keep us up to date on what's going on.

"It is a pitiful amount in the scheme of things, and frankly, we want lots of extra resources from finance firms. But we do not ask GlaxoSmithKline to fund chemistry textbooks. We should not ask HSBC to fund financial education textbooks. We need to put it on the curriculum. We need to make sure it's in the core curriculum, there’s an assessment.

"I think we all need to champion it, so every child in every school is educated. We live in one of the world's most competitive consumer economies, and we do not give our young people bias training. We do not give adults bias training, and we wonder why we have 880,000 people not claiming Pension Credit, the poorest in society, who aren't going to get their Winter Fuel Payments.

"We wonder why there's a car finance mis-selling campaign going at the moment where just by my own letters, 2.3 million people have been mis-sold by what's going on. Financial education is not about providing everybody with the answers. It's providing them with the knowledge and the experience to know what questions to ask.

"It can improve our society. It can make the economy more efficient because of the crossover skills. This isn't about enterprise. This isn't about business. We need to be very careful to separate proper consumer finance education from business studies and enterprise skills, and tell the children, 'You need to be tooled up to how you’re going to deal with a competitive environment'.

"Most of the financial education they get comes from adverts on social media or finfluencers who are touting that they should go into crypto. And we – society, big picture – do bugger all to stop it. Shall we change that?"