Financial Education

Debate between John Redwood and Mark Garnier

Thursday 15th December 2011 Commons Chamber

[Mark Garnier]

That is a neatly and well made point, but the hon. Gentleman will remember my hon. Friend the Member for South West Norfolk (Elizabeth Truss) making the point that, by having financial education in the curriculum, we would not just provide for directly funded schools but provide a lead for other schools to follow. That is an incredibly important point.

The Money Advice Service is part of the solution. It announced earlier this week the start of a new strategic oversight function for financial education. I shall quote from its press release, because it is always very good to hear such excellent civil service-speak. It says that the review is

“to inform and improve the provision of financial education for young people in the UK. Firstly, mapping the range of education initiatives funded by the financial services industry, to create a single view of the landscape; secondly, commissioning new research into education and behaviour change - to both identify global best-practice in the field of financial education; and examine whether successful types of intervention in other fields, for example health or drug education, can be applied to the area of money.”

That sounds fantastic, but there is a simple solution, which we keep repeating: we should put financial education on the curriculum in schools. We should get the Money Advice Service to concentrate on those adults who have not had the chance to get a financial education so far, and who are in desperate need of it to help them to deal with the problems that they face as a result of being financially illiterate.

As part of the all-party group inquiry team, I heard a great deal of interesting comment. I think I went to almost every single meeting, although I might have missed a couple. As we have heard, help is out there. Financial institutions go into schools to assist with financial education, but many teachers feel intimidated by the subject, presumably because they in turn did not receive a financial education. We have also heard that provision is sporadic: sometimes financial education is very good, but sometimes there is none at all. One member of the Arun youth council said that his school spent more time teaching him how to put on condoms than they spent teaching him about money. It was a thin day for bananas that day at his school.

The question is: how do we get financial education into the curriculum and where do we put it? Of course, there is a maths element—frankly, financial education is the type of thing that could enhance maths teaching. Teaching a child about compound rates of interest is not an exciting subject, but teaching a child that buying a pair of football boots for £125 on a credit card with an APR of 26% and paying that over six months will cost him a lot more than if he paid cash gives that child both a good example of how maths works and a lesson in financial facts.

If I were Martin Lewis, I would be able to work out in my head what that compound rate of interest would mean, but I was an investment banker and I am afraid I am completely unqualified to do so, as I would be if I were a footballer. However, to limit financial education to maths would be a huge mistake. Although maths can handle the quantitative side of things, it can do nothing about the qualitative side. We need people to make solid, judgment-based decisions. Maths will give people the skill to answer the question of whether they can afford something, but the question of whether they should buy something is just as relevant.

If I live in the centre of a city, the question of whether I should buy a car is a relatively simple one—there is plenty of public transport so I might not use it, parking might be a problem and so on. However, for an unemployed person living in the country with just a few hundred pounds to their name, the question of whether they should spend their last savings on a car so that they can find a job and make themselves more employable or keep the money to live on is much more difficult to answer. Many people are simply not equipped to make such a subjective evaluation.

[Mr John Redwood (Wokingham) (Con)]

Three constituents have written to me to congratulate my hon. Friend and colleagues on the work they have done on this matter. They said how important their work is and hope that it results in some improvement.

[Mark Garnier]

I am incredibly grateful for that intervention and thank my right hon. Friend very much indeed.

To continue my point, if we equip the next generation to answer the supplementary question to the one I just described—should I set up a business with my last few hundred quid?—we will begin not only to address the financial independence of our citizens, but to find the key to unlocking economic growth in future.

The fact that we are questioning whether financial education should be on the curriculum is a mistake. I fail to understand why it has not been on the curriculum for years. As we have discussed, the APPG has just published its report. The Minister has shown great interest in it and has read through it. We will keep pressing to ensure not only that he reads it again and again, but that he initiates its recommendations.

I shall conclude by mentioning the work of organisations such as PFEG, which we talked about earlier. Its work is incredibly important—it does a valuable job promoting financial education and co-ordinating the efforts of the financial services industry to get expertise into schools—but we must recognise its efforts by delivering the ultimate goal: a curriculum-based financial education which addresses not just maths and the quantitative elements of money management, but the qualitative and judgment-based elements of financial literacy.