It’s time Australian school children received explicit lessons that equip them to successfully financially function once they graduate… as New Zealand children are about to.

I'm a long-time financial literacy advocate and the smattering of financial capability content that is on the periphery of the Australian curriculum is NOT reaching many of our children… including my son, who will shortly complete Year 10 and has been prescribed just one exercise on money and its management in his decade of schooling.

I have written often since some money lessons were embedded in 2011 in various subjects in the curriculum, that it's possible to weave a wonderful path through school and entirely miss them. That's exactly what my own son has just managed.  

Meanwhile, New Zealand children are set to receive explicit, assessable instruction on money management in the core Social Sciences subject from January next year… throughout all of Years 1 to 10.

Here in Australia, over two-thirds of teachers (73 per cent) and one-third of parents (38 per cent) think financial education has become even more important in the past 12 months, found a recent study by not-for-profit education charity the Ecstra Foundation.

This belief is due to inflation and economic uncertainty, financial system complexity and the growing influence of social media and the move to digital transactions.

Moreover, Ecstra’s study found teachers (98 per cent) and parents (97 per cent) want money lessons in schools.

Seventy-three per cent of parents and 68 per cent of teachers and students think this should be in classroom lessons, by far the preferred option to workshops and incursions.

However, inexplicably, helping our children become ‘money smart’ seems to have fallen off the government's agenda, with the national financial literacy strategy paused in 2022, along with our participation in the OECD’s comparative test of students’ financial understanding.

Sign this petition to signal your wish to the Albanese government for financial capability to now be explicitly added to our Australian school curriculum as part of a core subject (for example, Social Sciences/HAAS).

Nicole Pedersen-McKinnon

Host of the Minted Kids family podcast; Author of the Money Secrets bookazine; Founder of Nicole's Smart Money; Creator of the Smart Money Start high school incursion; Money commentator and columnist across TV, radio, online and in the Sunday papers.