Most students leave secondary school able to solve a quadratic equation but unable to read a loan agreement — a gap that a single required course could meaningfully close.
Financial decisions made in the first few years after school — a first credit card, a first loan, a first pay-as-you-go phone contract — often set patterns that are difficult to unwind later.
Pilot programmes in a handful of schools have shown promising early results, with participating students demonstrating measurably better understanding of interest, debt and budgeting basics within a single term.
Scaling them nationally will require training a new cohort of teachers, since financial literacy sits awkwardly between existing subjects and rarely has a dedicated, confident teaching pool.
The cost of that training is real, but small relative to the cost, both personal and economic, of a generation that reaches adulthood without basic financial footing.
