Teenagers at GCSE level age should spend more of their school time being taught basic Financial Planning, a CFP professional has suggested, as youngsters pick up their GCSE exam results this morning.
Michael Smith CFP^CM, director of Chamberlyns, an IFP Accredited Financial Planning firm, said it would be far more useful for pupils to learn about money and finances than some of the subjects they have to study.

Mr Smith recently delivered a lecture on Financial Planning to final year Accounting and Finance students at the University of Northampton.

While he is not convinced a fully-fledged GCSE or A-Level qualification in Financial Planning would work, he believes a module perhaps spread across a term or half term would be invaluable.

Since September 2014 in England financial education has been included as one part of a larger subject called citizenship, which goes up to A-Level, but has attracted criticism from some personal finance campaigners.

MyBnk, a UK charity that teaches young people how to manage their money, wrote to the Government in February with ‘deep concerns’ that the financial element of citizenship studies had been excluded from exams, giving it significantly less importance for teachers.

It said the exams “completely ignored personal financial education and “young people will not be tested on things like budgeting, banking and interest rates”.

The ifs school of finance has also previously questioned how effective the lessons would be due to citizenship being a large subject and finance only being a small part of it.

{desktop}{/desktop}{mobile}{/mobile}

Citizenship covers a wide range of topics from justice to Parliament to ethnicity. Maths teaching has also adopted an element of personal finance. However, the national curriculum for Maths and citizenship is compulsory for only half of English schools, strengthening the concerns of sceptics, who have suggested that these lessons are far from adequate anyway.

Mr Smith welcomed the fact that personal finance had begun to be adopted into schools but believes there should be deeper integration.

He said Financial Planning “could be further assimilated into the time older children in particular spend at school, even if it is not a subject which is ultimately examined”.

He said: “At my secondary school we used to have weekly ‘forum’ lessons, in which a wide range of topics and issues would be explored.

“A module in basic Financial Planning, perhaps lasting for a term or half-term, across 1-3 years, could fit perfectly into this.”

He said: “As such, one important feature of Financial Planning is that, contrary to many other subjects, where one may not ‘see the point of it’, perhaps due to a lack of aptitude or perhaps fairly questioning its applicability in the world beyond school, money-related issues affect each and every person in some way or another throughout their lives.

“Accordingly, this may lead to a happy degree of engagement amongst students who otherwise struggle to be interested in, for example, languages, music, art, sport or the sciences.”

The Assessment and Qualifications Alliance created a Mathematical Principles for Personal Finance level 3 Free-Standing Maths Qualification but has decided to scrap it.

Mr Smith said he wished he had been given the chance to learn about personal finance when he was at school.

He said: “I know for certain that if I had been offered the chance to swap a lesson in art and design for a lesson in Financial Planning and money matters, I would have taken it in a heartbeat, since no matter how superb – or rather rubbish - my wooden clock in the shape of a teddy bear was as a 15 year old student, both of my daughters (aged 3 years and 18 months respectively) have more artistic dexterity than I have ever had.

“Moreover, even as a youthful 15 year old, I would have felt that even a basic understanding of financial matters could more fundamentally help my future than more time spent heating up bits of plastic and forming them into interesting shapes.”