Curriculum and Assessment Review

Baroness Sater Excerpts

Thursday 26th March 2026 Grand Committee

[Baroness Sater (Con)]

My Lords, I thank the noble Lord, Lord Freyberg, for securing this important debate. I will focus briefly on two areas: financial education and physical education.

On financial education, I welcome the review’s recognition of financial literacy, budgeting and wider life skills in the curriculum. With reforms expected by 2028, we now have a critical window to get this right. The proposals to strengthen financial education in secondary schools and to extend it into primary schools are absolutely a move in the right direction. We know that, if young people start early, they develop good money habits and build confidence in managing their finances.

Financial education has been statutory in secondary schools for over a decade, yet, as the Money and Pensions Service has reported, only around half of children receive a meaningful financial education. As the charity Young Enterprise has said, curriculum reform on its own is not enough: teachers need proper support, including training, clear guidance and high-quality resources.

The APPG on Financial Education for Young People, of which I am an officer, has also made it clear that financial education is not being adequately measured in our schools. Until it is inspected—for example, through Ofsted—it will not be prioritised, and, unless we focus on delivery, we risk repeating the same mistake we have seen in our secondary schools. So I do hope the Government will ensure that this is properly resourced, inspected and given protected curriculum time, because it is a life skill that every child deserves.

I turn now to physical education. We know that children are not getting enough physical activity. With huge concerns around high childhood obesity, mental health and well-being, schools are one of the few places where we can reach every child at scale. Once they leave, we lose one of the best opportunities to shape their lifelong healthy habits. There is already an expectation of around two hours of PE each week. However, as the review highlights, this is not delivered consistently—particularly in secondary schools, where the curriculum pressure is greatest. All too often, PE is squeezed out rather than protected.

The review rightly recognises that improving PE is about strengthening delivery, consistency and the conditions that schools need to make it happen. However, I also believe that we should be more ambitious. The Chief Medical Officer recommends around 60 minutes of physical activity a day for children; that should be our direction of travel, properly embedded into the school day. As Ali Oliver of the Youth Sport Trust said:

“By increasing physical activity levels in schools, we can develop children who are happy, healthy and ready to learn”.


I recognise that we cannot endlessly add to the curriculum, but, equally, we cannot continue to treat health and well-being as a secondary consideration. That is why physical education matters.

Finally, I urge the Government to go further by ensuring that financial education is properly resourced and given the priority it deserves, and by placing physical education at the heart of school life. If we want financially capable and physically healthy adults, we must start in our schools.