Financial education in schools – What should it look like?
As financial education becomes a more prominent part of the curriculum, what that looks like in practice will be down to schools, observes George Vlachonikolis…
- by George Vlachonikolis
- Assistant headteacher
In November 2025, the government published the final report of its Curriculum and Assessment Review, ‘Building a World-Class Curriculum for All’. The report brought some long-awaited attention to the area of financial education in schools.
This was alongside an acknowledgement that many young people still leave school without the skills needed to manage money with confidence.
The picture at primary
So what does this mean in practice? If financial education is to now be taken seriously at secondary level, what should pupils actually be taught at KS3 and KS4? How should that learning build on what they will have already encountered in primary school?
With the curriculum remaining non-statutory, the challenge won’t involve following a single prescribed model. It will instead entail designing a coherent and realistic programme that fits within existing constraint. At the same time, it needs to genuinely prepare young people for the financial realities of adult life.
So what specific changes can we expect to see? At primary level, financial education currently sits loosely across maths and non-statutory citizenship and PSHE.
KS1/2 pupils have been encouraged to learn about (but not be assessed on):
- the purpose of money
- how to manage, spend and save money
- the difference between needs and wants
The Curriculum and Assessment Review now recommends making citizenship statutory at primary, and positioning it as the formal home for financial education. It states that:
“A statutory primary Programme of Study should also equip pupils to develop their financial literacy skills, by understanding risks, core financial concepts, responsible practice, and the use of digital tools.”
Key objectives
In secondary schools, financial education has been a compulsory part of the KS3/4 citizenship curriculum since 2014. It has two main learning objectives:
- KS3: The functions and uses of money; the importance and practice of budgeting; managing risk
- KS4: Income and expenditure; credit and debt; insurance, savings and pensions; financial products and services; how public money is raised and spent
The Review makes no new specific recommendations for KS3 or KS4, however. This is despite acknowledging current widespread dissatisfaction among young people with respect to the financial education they receive at school.
For 16- to 19-year-olds, the Review suggests only that financial literacy may be developed through ‘non-qualification activity’. Examples of good practice are signposted, rather than specified.
Where we go from here
If we’re to design an effective financial education curriculum for KS3/4, then the first thing we must acknowledge is that students may lack a secure foundation in financial knowledge from primary school.
Even if a new National Curriculum were to introduce a clearer set of financial education learning objectives, it’s unlikely that these would be assessed through SATs, with Ofsted inspections likely to continue judging citizenship as a whole, rather than examining financial education in isolation.
A KS3 financial education curriculum would therefore need to be deliberately designed on the basis that pupils will arrive with uneven, partial or even entirely absent prior learning about money.
As a result, the start of any KS3 programme would have to function as a point of consolidation, rather than an extension of knowledge.
It should provide a space where informal experiences of money can be surfaced, made explicit and then turned into shared understanding.
In practice, this would mean establishing some common language at the outset; basic concepts and everyday financial behaviours that pupils may have already encountered at home or school.
As for what those ‘basic concepts’ might consist of, there’s no definitive list – but most Level 2 and Level 3 financial education courses (where they exist) will tend to converge on a similar set of themes.
- • Income and wealth
- • Spending
- • Saving
- • Protection (insurance)
- • Budgeting
- • Financial planning and goal-setting
- • Investment
- • Risk and reward
- • Personal finance across the life-cycle
Shared language
For me, the focus of a lesson on, say, ‘saving’ wouldn’t necessarily start with the maths of interest rates, but rather by eliciting pupils’ existing experiences of saving.
Where do they keep their money? Why do they save? What stops them from saving? Make this language explicit and shared.
From there, you can formalise those experiences by introducing agreed concepts (‘saving for goals’, ‘trade-offs’, ‘time’, ‘access’) and common behaviours, before then moving on to more structured learning that might compare different savings products, or explicitly teach compound interest.
If KS3 is about consolidation, then KS4 could present an opportunity to tackle broader ideas. An ambitious scheme of work might choose to cover further topics, such as:
- Payslips and tax codes
- Wider economic issues (such as inflation, tax rates and social welfare)
- Interest rates and monetary policy
- Exchange rates
- Relationship with political objectives
- Links to entrepreneurship
- The financial sector
When choosing which topics to include, schools will need to carefully consider whether they’re audience-appropriate and time-relevant.
Students will tend to prefer – and remember – content that’s useful to them in the here and now.
A sequence of interactions
Since there’s no mandate for how financial education should be delivered, schools will inevitably choose their own different approaches and priorities – hence we shouldn’t assume that all KS3/4 provision needs to follow a fixed course.
Instead, it can be thought of as a co-ordinated sequence of interactions that ensures students will encounter core financial concepts in a logical, cumulative order over time.
A school could, for example, choose to coordinate a series of events, which might include assemblies, a ‘£5 challenge’ initiative, and a money-themed ‘Focus Week’ over the course of two years.
Alternatively, they could ask that all subject departments embed various financial education learning objectives into their respective schemes of work, making use of cross-curricular approaches.
Investment clubs and Dragons’ Den-style enterprise clubs could then provide an extracurricular focus.
While a formal lesson once per fortnight might be the gold standard, a more flexible approach can still achieve the same overall aims.
What’s clear in any case is that ownership is essential if a programme of financial education is to work, requiring someone to structure, coordinate and maintain the sequence.
Without an assigned individual performing this role, even the most well-designed series of lessons and activities risks becoming fragmented.
With a clearly designated champion guiding the programme, however, students will encounter financial concepts in a coherent way, and soon develop a confidence in managing money that will serve them well into the future.
George Vlachonikolis is assistant headteacher at the independent day and boarding school, Headington Rye Oxford.
