Martin Lewis, the financial advice expert, has accused the government of undermining his efforts to ensure children in England are taught about mortgages and credit cards, saying schools are suffering from a “poverty” of financial education. Addressing the education select committee, Lewis said the successful campaign he led in 2014 to add financial topics to the national curriculum has had little to show for it in the decade since. “Getting it on the curriculum was a pyrrhic victory. In some ways it was counterproductive,” Lewis told MPs. “We campaigned hard to get it on the national curriculum. We got it on the national curriculum in England. At that point, a lot of resources were pulled that had been voluntary and private sector. And then we had the change in the way that schools work – the academisation programmes, the free school movement – all of which means they don’t have to follow the national curriculum.
“So the holy grail of trying to get it taught on a compulsory basis in every school, which is what getting on the curriculum was about, became self-defeating.” Lewis said that even those schools that did want to teach the topic were hampered by lack of resources and the failure to make the subject a high priority. “Frankly, the amount of resources the state and government has put in since then has been completely flaccid, and at a detrimental level. So while I can’t say that I regret we won the campaign at the time, I’m not sure it really changed the game in any way, because the rules were changed afterwards about what being on the national curriculum means, and I still think there is a real poverty of financial education in the UK. “Much of it comes down to a lack of resourcing for schools or lack of resourcing for teacher training and a lack of emphasis being put on this, for headteachers who are already overstretched.” Lewis said that where schools teach financial education, the topic is split between maths and citizenship classes. He called for schools to appoint a financial education coordinator to ensure it was being covered coherently in both areas. Damian Hinds, the schools minister, was asked by the committee if the government would expand financial education in primary schools to teach younger children. Hinds said there was already “explicitly” financial aspects of maths taught in infant school, but that there was a “further opportunity” to help teachers get better resources for the subject. “I want there to be more financial education. I would like for kids to say they had remembered it and had found it useful,” Hinds said.