Financial Capability resources

We were sitting in the staffroom the other day talking about a student who had been boasting that at the weekend he had persuaded his mum to buy him trainers that cost her £165 and we were saying that kids just don’t understand the value of money to the point that they behave as if it grows on trees! I was sitting with our HoD and I said that we ought to think about delivering some lessons focusing on money and financial skills and knowledge. Well the long and short of it is that he gave ‘muggins’ here the job of organising a scheme of work focusing on this area. Well, I went on to the Teaching Resources UK website and found some great resources focusing on Financial Capabilty

These lesson materials are fantastic! They have been designed to help students understand the history of the concept of ‘money’; from its early form of basic bartering to how it has developed into the modern banking system we have today.
They then look at issues associated with paying for, highlighting that everything has a price and, making the point that in order to obtain the things that we want, we must first accumulate enough money and to do that we must budget accordingly.

I’ll be using these resources in the coming weeks with my Y10’s so I will let you know how we get on.

Hello folks.

As I promised, I thought I would let you know how well the Y10 lesson went using the financial capability materials from ‘Teaching-Resources-UKso here goes.

There are four lessons in this mini scheme of work with the first lesson focusing on ‘Managing Money’. I started the lesson by highlighting the lesson objectives, which I wrote on a slide that I inserted into the PowerPoint presentation that is supplied as part of the lesson plan package. We then looked at the second slide and I asked the students to tell me what they estimated the various items on the list would cost. These were things like:

• The AA recommended number of driving lessons (47 in total)
• Marriage in a registry office
• A Passport etc.

I have to be honest they didn’t have a clue! A TV license £30!!! Bringing up a baby for a year - £1750!!!!)

Using the further slides in the presentation, we looked at the costs of things like owning a car, renting a flat and getting married. I have to say that I now well and truly believe that these lessons are absolutely vital because my students’ awareness of the cost of things was pretty dreadful, but something I will say is that the ‘Teaching-Resources-UK’ resources were fantastic, really clear and detailed and not having to having to prepare much for the lesson was very welcome.

Mrs Christy - They sound great,I love `Teaching -Resources ` website i used to use it every week for school assemblies and RE - some really good things on there.
I agree with you saying how little pupils understand the cost of things these days and how we should all address this if we are to prevent people from struggling with debt in the future .

Thanks mrsp they are great arn't they and these financial capability resources are just we need to get across the importance of being 'money savvy" I think!

O.K this is me reporting back on the second Y10 financial capability lesson that I’ve just delivered as I said I would. This time this lesson was on ‘Budgeting’ and was the second lesson in a mini scheme of work from ‘Teaching-Resources-UK’.

As with the first lesson package this one also consisted of a lesson plan as well as an associated PowerPoint presentation.

As I did in the previous lesson I slipped in an additional slide and typed in the lesson objectives, which I lifted from the lesson plan. After looking at the objectives we continued to use the presentation and we discussed and brainstormed the typical costs that the students have during an ordinary month. As you might expect these included the usual sweets, clothes, bus fares etc. and then from these we drew up a constructed a class list with which each student then identified their own monthly expenditure.

I then told them that they had £25 and then asked them various questions focusing around whether they could manage on that amount? Whether they had overspent? And What would they cut back on if they had?

We then constructed a holiday budget using the last slide in the PowerPoint.

As you can imagine, there was a lot of over-budgeting and consequently it made my students think that you’ve got to be careful when you are budgeting otherwise you can get yourself into trouble. At the end of the lesson we had an open discussion about the jobs that they intended to do when they left school and how much money they would earn in relation with what they had learned within the lesson.