Very few schoolchildren learn about the value of money and how to look after it, yet this is a critical life skill that should be taught as part of the school curriculum. Do you agree or disagree?

It may be true that schools don’t really teach young people how to handle their finances on a grand scale, but it isn’t true that they ignore the topic altogether. The problem may be that students don’t see the relevance of what they are taught. At primary school children learn to do mental arithmetic and simple calculations including fractions and decimals. At my school, maths problems at this level were set in a real context such as working out the cost of buying a T-shirt at 10% discount, or calculating interest when you put your pocket money in a savings account. Unfortunately, some children do not realise how useful these things will be later in life. For instance, if you borrow money to buy a car, you need to know how to work out for yourself how much it will cost you without relying on the finance company to tell you. Similarly people should only buy things on credit if they know how much it is really costing them if they don’t pay the debt off each month. It is possibly true that schools could try to make children understand the importance of all these areas, but children are young and cannot look into the future or predict the skills that they will need. Ultimately, people have to make their own decisions about what money is worth, based on their earnings and lifestyle. An education system can equip us to work out what is best, but it cannot save the money for us.