Why aren't Kiwi kids good with their money?

Amish Pratap has just bought his first car. But until last month, no one had taught the 16-year-old about borrowing money, choosing insurance or even opening a bank account.

Amish now counts himself one of the lucky ones. Now in his final year at Manurewa High School, he has finally started learning "financial capability" for two hours a week as part of his trades course.

"We have been asking about insurance, banks, term deposits, savings and cheques," he says.

"To be honest, I should have taken this ages ago. This is giving us so much information. If I took this ages ago, I would be much better with my money."

Classmate Logan Spencer, 17, opened his first bank account a couple of weeks ago after learning that he could earn interest on his money.

"I've been going to this school for four years now and I haven't ever learned a thing about how to pay taxes, what is a mortgage or what is a credit card," he says.

Somehow, many New Zealand students like Amish and Logan are emerging from 13 years of schooling without basic life skills.

A survey of 1000 young people who have either just left school or are about to leave, taken for the Commission for Financial Capability (formerly Retirement Commissioner), has found that 35 per cent learned "almost nothing" about money at school.

Another 38 per cent say they learned "some" things about money, and 27 per cent learned "a lot" about it.

Amish Pratap (student at right with hair topknot) counts himself lucky to be in teacher Gurpreet Kaur's financial capability class at Manurewa High School. Photo / Greg Bowker

Manurewa High School head of commerce, Gurpreet Kaur, who is teaching Amish and Logan, is horrified at what her trades students don't know.

"I asked 'who knows the difference between a credit card and an eftpos card?', and they didn't know the difference," she says.

"They didn't know what a term deposit is, they had never heard that word."

When Amish asked her how to insure his car, she asked him what he paid for it.

"He said $2000," she says. "So I told him there's no point getting full insurance, what you need is third-party insurance."

This ignorance, however, may be about to end. The new Labour Government has promised to equip all young people with a "school-leavers' toolkit" including financial skills as well as driver's licences, workplace skills and "civics" education about our political system.

"Having a driving licence so you can get to work, knowing how to fit into a workplace, knowing how to manage your money and knowing how to take your place in the community - these are all important skills in adult life," said Prime Minister Jacinda Ardern when she launched the toolkit last August.

Labour's pre-election "fiscal plan" earmarked $50 million a year for the toolkit from next year. Education Minister Chris Hipkins declined to comment further this week, saying: "The toolkit is being considered for Budget 2018."

Actually, financial capability has been in the New Zealand curriculum since 2007 and is supported by substantial resources on the Ministry of Education's website.

But Terry Shubkin of the Young Enterprise Trust, which has published workbooks for 17 unit standards on financial capability, says the topic is not treated as a separate learning area that all students must learn.

"It's an example of how you might teach something else, it's not its own curriculum area," shesays.

Although financial capability is in the NZ curriculum, it is not treated as a distinct subject, says Terry Shubkin of the Young Enterprise Trust. File photo

The curriculum says: "Links between learning areas should be explored. This can lead, for example, to units of work or broad programmes designed to... develop students' financial capability."

Last year only 564 students, about 1 per cent of the country's 49,000 Year 13 students, took the unit standard that Amish and Logan's class is studying, "Evaluate options to increase personal income." Kaur paid $495 for the workbook.

Gurpreet Kaur's class at Manurewa High School is among about 1 per cent of all NZ Year 13 students who are studying "options to increase personal income". Photo / Greg Bowker

Even the most popular financial literacy unit, a Level 2 standard on budgeting, attracted only 1636 students, just 3 per cent of all students in Year 12.

A survey last year by Cognition Education found 16 financial capability programmes and 67 resources being offered to schools by banks, accounting firms and budgeting agencies as well as the Young Enterprise Trust, the Ministry of Education and the Commission for Financial Capability.

Financial rating agency Canstar found that ANZ and ASB, and the NZ Credit Union/Baywide, offer banking for children in schools. The biggest, ASB, provided banking in 729 of the country's 2500 schools and its fun-based GetWise financial workshops reached many primary and intermediate schools.

The Skills Organisation, an industry training agency for several trades and services, has developed learner guides for the financial capability standards and a Work Ready Passport for high-school students including "managing your money".

Comet Auckland, an Auckland Council agency, has developed a similar "licence to work". Skills manager Shirley Johnson says every senior student at Māngere's Southern Cross Campus will get the licence this year, and she hopes it will become part of Hipkins' school-leavers' toolkit.

A small Christchurch-based start-up has developed an online program, Banqer (pronounced "Banker"), for primary school students to simulate earning, borrowing, saving and spending money on things such as renting desks. Kiwibank is funding 2100 classes in more than 700 schools to use the software this year.

Chief operating officer Simon Brown says the group has just launched a platform for secondary schools, Kohorts, but has found it difficult to break into subject silos.

"In Years 9 and 10 it's coming into business studies or social studies or the careers adviser - we want it picked up by any teacher," he says.

The Commission for Financial Capability's head of research Simon Peel says: "The bottom line is that unless students attended classes in economics or accounting - which is a minority of students, less than 20 per cent - they likely learned very little or nothing about finance and money in school."

In 2014, the commission found that 73 per cent of high-school students agreed that "I want to learn more about how to manage my money". Almost all teachers (99 per cent) and school leaders (98 per cent) agreed that all students should learn about financial literacy.

The commission's latest survey has found that 82 per cent of school-leavers want schools to teach about money in class time.

Gurpreet Kaur offered "Secrets of Money" as an option to Manurewa High School's 450 Year 9 students this year, but only five students wanted it so she had to drop it. Photo / Greg Bowker

But the high schools' subject structure is a key barrier. At Manurewa High School, Kaur was so excited by the response of her Year 13 trades students that she persuaded the school board to approve a course on "Secrets of money" as an option in Year 9 this year for three periods a week for six months.

Only five out of 450 Year 9 students took it up, so she had to drop it.

"The parents are saying, take science, maths, academic subjects," she says.

"I tried to make it compulsory but they said they can't fit all the options in."

Secondary Principals Association president Mike Williams says he doesn't know where financial capability and other elements of the school-leavers' toolkit will fit.

"You can't argue with the intent, it's really good stuff. It comes down to, what do we stop doing to do the driver's licence and financial literacy, etc?," he says. "That is the question and the debate that needs to happen."

Commission schools manager Kelly Gay is looking for teachers to help design financial capability resources to use across multiple curriculum subjects. Photo / Doug Sherring

The commission's new schools manager, Kelly Gay, believes the answer is to weave money into existing subjects such as maths, science, social studies and English.

"It would be a mistake to teach it as a stand-alone programme. It's the context that makes it exciting and memorable," he says.

He is looking for schools and teachers to "co-design" money-related projects across all subjects, which the commission will then offer to all schools at no charge.

The Cognition report suggests that schools could be required to teach financial capability by the National Administration Guidelines, which already require them to cover all areas of the curriculum and, for example, to provide careers advice in Years 7 to 13.

But Post Primary Teachers Association president Jack Boyle warns against adding to the already-detailed monitoring of schools, and suggests that life skills such as financial capability should not be "credentialed".

"I will be supporting the school-leavers' toolkit. Our profession is well behind it," he says.

Jack Boyle says teachers support a "school-leaver's toolkit" as part of a reduced emphasis on accumulating credits. File photo

He hopes that a 30-year plan for education, which Hipkins has signalled, will shift the emphasis away from subject credits on to what the curriculum calls the "key competencies" of thinking, managing self, relating to others, participating and contributing, and using language, symbols and texts.

"If we move away from an undue concentration on credit aggregation for three years, one of the themes that has emerged around the review is having fewer standards and teaching more broadly to the entire curriculum area, that is going to free up time spent on assessment and give time for teachers to be going there," he says.

Maths Teachers Association president Gillian Frankcom-Burgess says all good maths teachers already use real-world problems that build financial capability, such as comparing smartphone plans or working out how much inflation will add to the price of a scooter.

But she says teachers have to beware of using examples that students are not yet interested in, such as teaching about car insurance too soon.

Just because Year 13 students say they didn't learn anything about finance earlier in their school years, she says, "doesn't mean they didn't get it earlier - they may not have been interested".

Shubkin from the Young Enterprise Trust suggests that schools should see financial capability and other life skills as part of their "pastoral care" of students, rather than trying to fit them into academic subjects.

"I'll be honest. I used to think the answer was getting into the curriculum. I don't now," she says.

"I think the solution is figuring out how we (a) convince all the schools that this is an important part of their pastoral care, and (b) give support to the teachers to make it easy for them to teach it.

"They are restricted in time, resources and experience, so sometimes you have teachers that think it's a great idea but just too hard. So the easier you make it by giving them resources, training and support, the more likely they are to teach it."

Logan Spencer (far left) believes all high-school students need to learn the money management skills that his trades class is finally learning this year. Photo / Greg Bowker

Somehow or another, Logan Spencer at Manurewa High believes all students need to learn the skills he is finally learning.

"I asked my mum, 'How do you manage your money, Mum?'" he says. "She said, 'Didn't they teach you at school?'"