How was your summer then? The schools have been back for us lot up north for a couple of weeks now. Granted, I shouldn’t have celebrated this with my best Andy-Dufrene-at-the-end-of-Shawshank celebration in the playground, but I think living an authentic life is important.
Southerners? Hang on in there siblings, sunlit uplands are in sight.
Talking education (KAPOW! There’s the segue), me and my research team are Peak Excite as we have live research in the field now. This is not your normal cross-section of society gig, this is 17- to 23-year-olds on their views of financial planning and financial education. The abstract? See all the chin stroking we do in this sector around financial education, the advice gap, the supply gap of planners et al? What do people at the very start of their adult lives think?
Knowing I was on Update duty today, I was hoping to tease some results, but fieldwork still has a day or so to go. Not to be foiled, I decided to conduct some renegade research of my own. I have four kids, a number so surprising it should really have F-O-U-R spelled right after it like the classified football results did in the 80s.
(Baby) Eva has just started school and is therefore an outlier in our data set. She presented as a willing interviewee but, candidly, was more interested in Paw Patrol being interrupted.
I turned to my youngest lad next. Just started third year at high school, Adam’s response to “do you reckon it’s a good thing that a bit of financial education is now included in school” was…
“I’ve only briefly touched on it but I think it’s really good, I think we do more of it later in maths.”
Amelie (10) brought a unique perspective. She’s being homeschooled for the foreseeable for #reasons and her prescient (if a little cutting) response was “well that means I’m relying on you Dad, isn’t it”. Panicked thoughts turned to her spending a chunk of her holiday money on a giant box of tic tacs. Dad needs to raise his game.
Hope for an in-depth answer now rested entirely on my eldest, George, 17 and entering his last year of school. His thoughts?
[on whether it’s good that finance is a part of his curriculum] “Yeah I think it is on the whole, but I feel there could definitely be a lot more sort of focus on it in places because sometimes unless you pick – say accounting – there’s a good chance you completely miss any sort of teaching on it. So, I’d say it could definitely be conveyed to us better because it is quite an important thing for high schoolers to know about.”
I replied, probing him on the fact he’s done the Applications of Maths course for three years now. Not extensive enough?
“I think it’s a good way of getting it taught to us but I feel the focus is more heavy on, like, solving the maths rather than anything key about finance itself and things like it.”
I think we can conclude three things from my short qualitative research phase for this Update. (1) George brings an interesting, lived experience to the subject. I was most interested in his perception that the balance of teaching could tilt a little more towards the wider subject as opposed to the pure methodology. George is worth listening to on a number of levels but chiefly as he now also works four nights a week at the local chippy and I can assure you he manages his finances to the point he has more disposable income than me.
(2) Cobbled together night-before-a-deadline qualitative research is no substitute for fully planned, professional exercises but (3) it was still more in-depth than some white papers I’ve read in this sector (miaow Steve!).
My own thoughts? The professional researcher in me wants to devolve any responsibility until I get my hands on the data but until then, I have thoughts, six of them.
- Some degree of financial education in schools can only be a good thing. Notably, in our last State of the Advice Nation fieldwork in November ‘24, most new planners to the profession thought that schools/further education was our best shot at encouraging the planners of the future.
- This ain’t a politics blog (TAAPB)#1 but one point of nervousness I have around all this is 10+ years of being married to a teacher and knowing how stretched the profession and wider curriculum is.
- TAAPB#2 but the increasing wealth gap isn’t exactly helping either. Not that I have an answer to that mind.
- There’s loads of amazing people in the world who are doing wonderful, tangible, positive things with their lives (as opposed to performative pavement painting TAAPB#3) and it feels like every second advice firm I speak to does some kind of social outreach in the community. More power to you all.
- There’s an embedded, societal bias around attitudes towards numeracy compared to literacy. Why has it become socially acceptable to be all like “I’m no good with numbers lol”? I absolutely don’t have an answer to that either.
- I also wonder if financial education has become a collective comfort blanket for our sector, which for decades has proved that it is utterly incapable of communicating like humans for any length of time.
Perhaps HL Mencken put it best when he said that “For every complex problem, there’s a solution that is simple, neat, and wrong.”
Your music for the week is a lang cat Update veteran. With a new album out and a UK winter tour on the horizon, Amelie and I will be bringing our massive box of tic tacs to Glasgow Hydro to see the incomparable Ellie Rowsell and co in Wolf Alice. Here’s an all-timer of a track at the Glasto golden hour.
