Financial Guidance and Claims Bill [HL] — House of Lords, 2017-07-19
Topic: Education
Alan Brooke (Crossbench, Unknown): My Lords, I welcome these amendments because they attract attention to the subject of education, which, in our report on financial exclusion, was a major part. The top of Clause 2(7) states: "The strategic function is to support and co-ordinate the development" It does not appear to have a lot of force behind it. Anything that we can do for care leavers, or anyone else, is most welcome, but one has to go back a stage and ask about the perfectly normal schooling that goes on: is the education actually occurring and, no matter what we write here, will it happen We wrote in our report: "When considering provision in English secondary schools it is also important to note that the national curriculum"— to which financial education was added in 2014— "applies only to maintained schools (those run by local authorities) and not to academies, free schools and the independent sector" That has resulted in there being still no requirement for English primary schools to include financial education as part of their teaching. In addition, as only 35% of state-funded secondary schools are now maintained schools, the obligation to teach financial education does not apply at all to nearly two-thirds of all secondary schools. Therefore, there was a big hole in this from the start. No matter what we say in these clauses to attract attention to all parts of schooling, the basic financial education is not taking place, as the noble Earl said From the point of view of our report, the one thing I could never understand is that we are talking about financial education throughout people’s lives, and the only time we have the total population—in this case of England—within our control and have their attention is at school. If we do not have compulsory financial education of some kind in school, when things go wrong later we do not know where we are trying to pick them up from. When we raised this subject, the question of teacher time arose. We also heard the comment that teachers were not qualified to teach financial education. However, at the moment we have no financial education and anybody must be qualified to teach children—we all had money boxes—to save a bit, to add it up, to save it for the weekend, even if it is done with sweets or whatever. They complicate this by saying, "How can teachers be capable of teaching children about pensions and so on?". We are not getting to the point of teaching them about things like that in the first place, and surely there must be a simple level playing field by the time everybody leaves school, or they are permitted to leave at the earliest age of 15. By that time all young people should have been given a very basic financial education: how to save money, where to put it, what a bank is for and so on. I do not believe that not being able to teach them about investing in the stock market or pensions is the crucial point As I understand it, a comment made in the Youth Parliament, made up of young people who have left school and are ready to go to university, showed that one of their highest priorities was that they had not been given any financial education. These are life skills. All education, whether it is in physics, chemistry or geography, is part of a young person’s education and is for a job, but financial education is a basic skill and the lack of it is the cause of so many social problems in our country. Why can we not ensure a level of financial skill when young people leave school so that anybody picking them up later on knows that they have only to go back so far? Instead, we have some young people with a little knowledge and many with none. So I totally support these amendments for drawing attention to the issue, but I am afraid that we have to go back one stage further. We have to do something about this because once young people have left school, we no longer have the audience and we wait for them to appear in debt, homeless and everything else. For those reasons, I certainly support the amendment.