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BLOG: Banking on Barclays

Lawrence Gosling
Written By:
Lawrence Gosling
Posted:
Updated:
10/12/2014

Is personal education in schools the answer to all the nation’s financial problems?

Personally, I have been a big advocate of teaching about ‘money’ in schools for years, but more recently I am beginning to wonder.

Not because the youth of the UK have turned from spenders to savers, which you will know if you have children or your clients have. No, I am beginning to wonder about the real value of teaching personal finance in schools for a couple of reasons.

Firstly, teachers are largely not equipped to do so, and do not have the required resources. Should we expect teachers to explain how money works alongside sex education and ‘citizenship’?

Is it any wonder education standards have gone downhill since teachers were asked to guide our children in all these ‘soft’ subjects outside the curriculum?

Over the past decade, many worthy and well-meaning organisations have tried to fill the gap in schools on personal finance and money issues, but, as I discovered recently, this not just a handful of charities but close to 50 different schemes, charities, trade bodies and the like.

Ironically, there are more organisations doing this than there are national banks, buildings societies, life companies, or general insurers. That is not to say a lot of these nationwide financial institutions do not contribute to the efforts.

Surely if personal finance is so important, input into schools should be a coordinated effort.

But it would be wrong to think government either can or wants to coordinate this. If it did you would see it as a core policy in the manifestos of the main parties. But do not hold your breath – teaching the young to save or work out interest on loans will not be seen as a vote winner.

So who, or what, should be running this push into schools?

Some of the best work is being done by debt charities or the Citizens Advice Bureau, which, by its nature, is coping with the basic money management side of things, often for children who come from areas of deprivation and whose parents are those most open to exploitation by payday loan companies.

A group doing an extremely impressive amount of work in the broader area is one which may surprise many people – Barclays Bank.

Barclays, over the past few years, has been developing its LifeSkills programme, which aims to reach a million young people by 2015.

The programme not only includes dealing with money but also helps young people to get a job by giving them work experience, helping them with their CV, and all the other associated LifeSkills they might need. It might not be fashionable to say it, but based on the success Barclays has had to date with LifeSkills, perhaps it should take over personal finance education in schools.

Lawrence Gosling is editorial director of Incisive Media. His views are his own, any comments to him at lawrencegosling1@gmail.com