Schools: Financial Education

Lord Addington Excerpts

Wednesday 31st January 2024 Lords Chamber

[Lord Addington (LD)]

My Lords, I congratulate the noble Baroness, Lady Sater, on doing most of the heavy lifting, which was just as well considering the sprint relay event that followed it.

The noble Lord, Lord Polak, caught my thoughts most clearly when he said this must be embedded throughout the education system. I was thinking of Jane Austen, who writes about little other than money; if you look at English, and then look at Dickens, they all go there. History records it as well—the fact you have these institutions that come down to us—but it depends on the bit you are doing; the Tudors may not be quite as relevant as the first Labour Government after the war, but it is all there. You need to reinforce the idea—the noble Lord, Lord Davies, caught that as well, that it is an idea you are going for—and the maths behind it, such as compound interest and interest rates, as the noble Earl, Lord Effingham, said, and apply it and put it across.

My question to the Minister is: when does she think this reinforcing of ideas across the curriculum stands a chance of being integrated into a programme of study that most people will come across? We want to make it so that you cannot avoid this subject, and not just fall asleep and write it off because you do not like it—if anybody here says they did not do that during a lesson at school, they are lying to themselves. There are people who will simply not get it, but if the idea is bounced around, some may stand a chance of it being ingrained. This is a big subject with lots of ramifications and tentacles. If you treat it as a one-off lesson substitution, you will annoy everybody who likes the subject that you are cutting, and you will guarantee that some just will not get it at all.