Is there a lack of financial education in the UK from family and schools?

onomatopoeia99

Heard on the news this morning that budgeting and mortgages are to be added to the curriculum in English schools, which should please some of the people complaining that it should be taught in school.

It's all just applied maths anyway; budgeting is elementary arithmetic within the ability of an eight year old, mortgages can involve logs and exponents if calculating repayments from scratch, not that anyone should need to.

Jemma01

onomatopoeia99 said:

Heard on the news this morning that budgeting and mortgages are to be added to the curriculum in English schools, which should please some of the people complaining that it should be taught in school.

It's all just applied maths anyway; budgeting is elementary arithmetic within the ability of an eight year old, mortgages can involve logs and exponents if calculating repayments from scratch, not that anyone should need to.

I do hope it won't turn into a math lesson and calculations, but rather a mindset of not spending what you don't own, spending within your means, handling debt and measuring when debt is needed )as is the case with investments and mortgages), understanding the consequence of interest fugures. It is a culture and a way of thinking. 

dreaming

onomatopoeia99 said:

Heard on the news this morning that budgeting and mortgages are to be added to the curriculum in English schools, which should please some of the people complaining that it should be taught in school.

It's all just applied maths anyway; budgeting is elementary arithmetic within the ability of an eight year old, mortgages can involve logs and exponents if calculating repayments from scratch, not that anyone should need to.

Yes, you're right, it is all "just applied maths". The trouble is that the way it is often taught is in a seemingly abstract way That may just be my experience although I have spoken to others who felt the same. I went to a grammar school in the 60s and maths was taught to a high standard but it was taught without any real explanation of why you needed about it. The basic arithmetic bit we learnt in primary school at least applied to things such as buying apples etc., but once in senior school it just seemed a lot of equations and formulae we had to memorise and I certainly had no idea what use it was in day to day life. One teacher did explain something about how to calculate the height of a roof using triangulation (?), which meant very little to a 12 year old girl. I had no knowledge of mortgages, pensions, income tax, or national insurance - they were just "grown up's words".  None of the other girls seemed to know much either (it was an all-girls school). Maybe it was just the times - money ("finances") didn't seem to be discussed so much then in my circle. Even when my own children went to senior school in the 1990s the teaching was still very similar and I remember my son moaning about why he had to learn about certain things in Maths (and jhe was actually very good at it) but luckily by then I had learned about how useul if could be in everyday life and I tried to be more open about our mortgage and budget etc.. and how I could keep things on track by using those skills. I think I would have been much more engaged if our lessons had been "applied" to real life situations rather than just an exercise in regurgitating what we had been taught. Even in the last couple of years my grandson at 18 and getting his first job was asking why they hadn't been taught about pensions as he had been given the option of joining his company scheme. Again, he was a bright boy and received good grades in Maths GCSE (plus 6 other good passes) and had spent 2 years at college, so it seemed to me that not much had changed. As an adult, I had quite a few lightbulb moments of learning how (for example) compound interest worked, when I suddenly realised "ah, that's what that lesson was all about", and actually went on to have a good career in finance in my 40s, so it wasn't a total mystery but I still think the methods used could be more app;icable to everyday life.

Pollycat

onomatopoeia99 said:

Heard on the news this morning that budgeting and mortgages are to be added to the curriculum in English schools, which should please some of the people complaining that it should be taught in school.

It's all just applied maths anyway; budgeting is elementary arithmetic within the ability of an eight year old, mortgages can involve logs and exponents if calculating repayments from scratch, not that anyone should need to.

Unless things change drastically for the better, I'm not sure that teaching about mortgages will be of benefit to the majority of children at school now.

As for elementary arithmetic, it's context that's needed.
As someone pointed out up-thread:

lincroft1710 said:

Anyone who has read Charles Dickens' "David Copperfield" will probably have gained a wealth of financial wisdom

"Annual income twenty pounds, annual expenditure nineteen pounds nineteen shillings and sixpence, result happiness. Annual income twenty pounds, annual expenditure twenty pounds ought and six, result misery".

MattMattMattUK

Whilst I agree with teaching an element of finance in schools the problem is often not a lack of understanding, although it can be, but it is more often than not a lack of ability to delay gratification, poor impulse control. So those who borrow, those who get into debt, those who use finance for pretty much anything other than a mortgage are choosing not to delay gratification, they are not saving up, they are buying now on credit and facing the consequences. They are choosing to give in to their impulses rather than control them for medium and long term gain. 

Until we address the issue that we ultimately need to further limit access to credit to deal with that then regardless of how much we attempt to educate, we will not improve the situation of most of those people.