MSE News: Small step towards financial education in schools

Money is already in the curriculum and we all teach it (and despair because some children have no experience of it and it makes it really hard to teach). I have just spent a week working on advertising with year 4 children and we have been calculating the best offers from store prices and seeing how much we get for our money.

Please do not fall into the trap of thinking that this is anything that we do not already do at an appropriate level for the children we teach.

Dig deeper into the consultation document and you will find them learning bases, binary, practising with compasses and rote learning calculation methods with no understanding - in NO WAY is this a move forward. If the draft becomes statutory children will have less time to handle and work with money and money problems as they will end up spending time on roman numerals and struggling with column methods they are not mature enough (at age 6 and 7) to handle.

For goodness sake...teachers have been doing this since day 1 of school...government are trying to convince you it's a step forward when it's already happening everywhere.

If parents would take their children out to the shop, put a coin or 2 in their hands and let them look at the change they get, then we would be far further on.

How sad is it that I had to give my year 1 class of 5 and 6 year olds homework where they had to find something in a shop to buy for 20p or 50p, record the price and record the change given in coins. About 60% of the kids never did the homework, 30% of kids reported how excited they were as they held their own 50p and participated in a transaction. It was only 10% who had already bought something in a shop.

It is not a schools job to teach everything a parent should have taught. In my classroom, I can't give weekly exposure to buying something in a shop and getting change - parents can and are best placed to. They can take time to look at the coins, predict the change, look at the coins that make the change... but some parents choose not to and the more the government put these home skills into the school curriculum, the less some parents will feel they have to do at home as "that's school's job".

Eagerly awaiting the day when the school curriculum contains things like potty training, how to eat with a knife and fork and how to dress.

Dunroamin wrote: »

Do you actually think that this is what this news item's about?

Do you actually think that it isn't?






:wall:

Dunroamin wrote: »

I know that it isn't - but then I've actually read the article.;)

As have I. Perhaps I should start only looking at the smaller picture and the short term.

I'm new to this forum so don't know if this has been said before - but financial education is as much about Personal, social and health education as maths. It's about preparing young people to play an active part in society, to understand how society works, understand the media/peers/advertising, build skills to resist pressure, have values etc, etc,etc!! A day never goes by when I don't hear someone saying 'the schools need to address this' be it teenage sex, drugs, gangs, riots. The truth is teachers want to teach these things, they care about their pupils, but there is no time in the curriculum and no funding for teachers to be trained to deliver if there was time! We really need to campaign for PSHE to be compulsory and this should include financial education, it's the only way schools will give it the time and development it deserves. Rant over!