Financial Education

molerat

Agreed.  My daughter is a teacher - she could certainly teach the kids how to spend money and be in their overdraft about a week after payday !

IMO financial education is something that can't be taught, it has to be learnt and some people never learn !

Helen8987

That is the need of a youth to do their best in their careers. However, a fully qualified community will guide those members and through sharing their ideas it will be worth. The main thing is to develop skills in youth to do their best in their careers, Which isn't teaching to them in their institutes. They just keep on to learn theory and make their grades up and to gain CGPA.

I face a lot of difficulties when I step into professional life. I have no idea about any thing how to deal and communicate with your colleagues. At that time I come to realize that what I have learned, In which  position I am .That's the time I realize that I haven't did anything practical yet and I have no knowledge about skills related to your chosen field. And when I learned all that skills I feel confident in my field and I come to know the deficiencies of our company. What they aren't doing to go to the top and then I meet to my boss to share all these things in a meeting. My boss understand my all ideas and appreciate me on that. Then we start to work together like a team to progress and to excel from our competitors. That's all come to us through skills learning and practical. Its rightly said " Learn today lead tomorrow".
Thanks!

Roger175

I think many people would be astonished to hear it, but this goes far deeper - My wife works in a primary school and they are finding many kids don't actually understand the concept of money.

With the move towards a 'cashless' society, many of the kids never see actual money (in terms of notes and coins), all they see are their parents swiping a plastic card and they don't actually understand the whole principle of 'money'. My wife initially noticed this when trying to explain basic maths...ie. if you have 50p pocket money and you spend 25p on sweets, how much have you got left? etc,,,she found she was being met by a blank stare and began to realise it was the actual money bit the kids didn't understand, rather than the maths behind it.

The pandemic has obviously accelerated the shift away from cash, I find that I rarely use cash and never have a £1 available for the trolley in Aldi!, but it needs to be recognised as a potential timebomb and early years education adapted to make this part of the curriculum. 

MallyGirl

It is a real issue. I answer the odd question here and there on The Student Room and a worrying number of students aiming for uni just don't understand money, how student finance works, etc. The number of them turning up with CIFAS markers having been a money mule is shocking.
I have tried to teach my daughter about money and so far all seems to be going well but I can't use examples from my own youth as she thankfully doesn't live in that world (low income single parent).

zagfles

Our kids have had their own accounts since they were about 11, they've managed them really well. I think the concept of electronic money came really easily to them because they'd played all sorts of electronic games with concepts like money, coins, energy, lives etc which you can "earn" and "spend" and if you spend it your balance of that resource goes down. So a bank account with a card was like a simplified version of a computer game!

Really important to teach them about scams like money mule, overpayment scams, changed bank details scams etc, plus how to enter a PIN without anyone else being able to see what it is, amazing the number of numpties who do blatently obvious single finger entry of PINs which anyone around can see.

gm0

This is a solvable problem.  It's important but not urgent.  The DOE will screw it up with a load of additional public sector value and contemporary cultural obsesssion overlays. So first order of business is to find a safe place to stand to execute in terms of investment and building teacher support materials with a blended team - teaching, digital media, personal finance (but not from sell side) and yes the DOE but configured where they do their own mapping to legislation and risk management crap (internalise that back into the civil service and off the back of the delivery team.  That's the value they can bring. Making it all go away by negotiation or filling out the forms once per year.  Write that down in the quality plan.  Off you go.

Setup for fast iteration and teacher feedback, and student survey feedback. Prioritise ruthlessly.  Digital video content with support materials.  Relevant (to scenario when it's about what happens to granny, youth/20s generally). Change the surveys regularly but not during a conduct so that they can be used ot improve outcomes without completely throwing off the classroom delivery.

Up to date without being tech evangelist as it's not about Apple Pay and Apps or Fintech or particular tools in and of themselves (see also teaching Excel as a proxy for IT).  it's about why you would look at cost of credit or check your outgoings for extraneous charges from time to time.  Keep it relevant and engaging - use people like me - ethnic mix per national ONS mix.  Hire suitable case study actors and you are done.  Signpost islamic finance at relevant point for community education. Done.

Rank your problems to prioritise backlog (financial size, individual impact, political saliency). Resistance to fraud, Understanding cost of credit, saving for emergencies, retirement issues, relationship breakdown issues.

Nebulous2

Roger175 said:

I think many people would be astonished to hear it, but this goes far deeper - My wife works in a primary school and they are finding many kids don't actually understand the concept of money.

With the move towards a 'cashless' society, many of the kids never see actual money (in terms of notes and coins), all they see are their parents swiping a plastic card and they don't actually understand the whole principle of 'money'. My wife initially noticed this when trying to explain basic maths...ie. if you have 50p pocket money and you spend 25p on sweets, how much have you got left? etc,,,she found she was being met by a blank stare and began to realise it was the actual money bit the kids didn't understand, rather than the maths behind it.

The pandemic has obviously accelerated the shift away from cash, I find that I rarely use cash and never have a £1 available for the trolley in Aldi!, but it needs to be recognised as a potential timebomb and early years education adapted to make this part of the curriculum. 

The world is changing - faster than most of us recognise, and some people are left behind. Its 20 years since my children were at primary school, and one thing that shocked me speaking to one of the teachers was that a lot of children came to primary school unable to use cutlery. All they ate was what we would have called finger food. 

Given that there are children who don't really get the concept of money - what chance have they of avoiding debt, understanding interest and understanding the concept of saving for something they need? 

In primary we used to take money to school every week in an envelope to go into school savings - with the TSB, which started us with a savings account and the basic concept of how it grew, from an early age. 

Malthusian

Physical coins aren't a necessity for kids to learn about money. As Zagfles said, kids grasp the concept of spending money in computer games perfectly well, which are purely abstract with no physical element.

Most kids (primary school age up) are perfectly capable of understanding the concept of mum or dad swiping a card which reduces the amount in the bank account attached to the card. If a child has never been allowed to use money then of course they won't understand money.

The earliest computer game I can remember playing which had money was The Secret of Monkey Island, and I remember being hesitant to spend my pieces of eight in case I ran out and needed them later - which is hilarious in hindsight, because in a game like Monkey Island it is impossible to spend too much money as the game will not let you put yourself in an unwinnable position. But it says a lot that my instincts were like that even then.

At some point kids will go to the sweet shop with their basic phone or smart watch and pay for their 25p of sweets via Google Pay or another app. I'm not proposing to give them all smartphones with full Internet access; a limited functionality phone poses the same danger to a child as a Casio watch.

michaels

I wonder if the zirp (plus low inflation) environment makes it harder to understand the advantages of savings than it was for us growing up and seeing 'interest' make the value of our savings at least appear bigger?

There also seems to be much more about maximising immediate utility in life generally rather than saying what will make me happiest over a longer period.  Ie that McDonald's now is preferred over getting dinner at home and having cash to save towards a car/holiday.

jim8888

A childhood memory for me is being taken to the Post Office on a Saturday morning by my mum to pay into a National Savings account. You were given a wee blue book that was stamped and signed with every deposit. I think that's where the importance of saving money was distilled into me - I didn't realise why it was important at the time, but the ceremony and certificate made it seem so. I didn't learn about compounding and investing until I was about 30 and felt a bit cheated that nobody had explained it to me before then in terms that might have made it seem important too!