It’s a crying shame according to Dr Tracey West, Financial Education Manager at Ecstra Foundation, which has just released its Financial Education in Schools Survey results for 2025.
The survey canvassed the thoughts and opinions of 417 teachers, 815 parents and 891 students aged 10-17 and the results were not entirely surprising.
Ninety-five per cent of teachers said learning about money is important, along with 98 per cent of parents and 93 per cent of students, while just 46 per cent of students said they’d learned how to save money and 33 per cent learned about budgeting and household finances.
Of great concern is that the peak body for business educators in Australian schools described the current curriculum approach to financial literacy as “fragmented” and “dispersed across several learning areas”.
“It could be a student goes through most of their schooling without dedicated financial literacy learning,” West says.
“We need a national approach that helps families, schools and community learn more about financial literacy and get those money/life skills they need for key decision points in life.”
West says many young people are leaving school disillusioned that they’re not prepared for life after school.
“There’s a whole range and scope of things when you get older and start being exposed to making more decisions that are new to you,” she tells EducationHQ.
“So for young people, it’s around directing them to ... trusted sources of financial information and understanding that there are people with other agendas that are putting information out there that might not be independent.”
Financial literacy is in the curriculum, but it is taught inconsistently across different subject areas. Ecstra Foundation’s Dr Tracey West says rather than being piecemeal across a broad range of curriculum areas, she’d love to see it given priority as a stand-alone.
Many schools are certainly teaching financial literacy in different forms, and West says in many maths classes applied assignments are covering things like buying a car, getting a loan and insurance etc.
“The business studies curriculum is also very good, and if students continue to take that on past the compulsory Year 8 level, then they are doing financial literacy projects or market days and are learning a great deal about managing their money, but unfortunately that’s not all students.
“If you had a dedicated subject that talks purely about money or personal finance or even economic literacy, you could talk to students about insurance, the purpose that it has in society for managing risk, why and where we need it, how it impacts climate change and different tax settings with different types of cars, EV’s versus petrol cars.
“When governments are putting policies out there, people aren’t able to debate on them or be informed consumers or informed voters when they’re going to elections.
“So it’s all, in my opinion, wrapped up into economic literacy, financial literacy, civics and citizenship.
“It is a challenge now more than ever to put our own independent financial decisions and how we go about that into a societal context as well.”
Just 23 per cent of students from the survey said they had learned about investing, 24 per cent about taxation and a mere 14 per cent about superannuation.
Ecstra is pushing for more focus on financial literacy skills in the classroom and curriculum, as well as supporting families to talk money at home.
The organisation produced four workshop modules for shools – with two workshops within each module.
“We’ve got a module aimed at Year 5 and 6, which is around developing or raising awareness that everyone has different money stories and everyone has unique money stories, and that there’s different ways and values to which you can align your money decisions to. So that’s the entry point,” West says.
“And then we have a Year 7 and 8 workshop module, which is aimed more in depth at spending decisions and influences on your spending.
“So we go into peer pressure and social media influences and we look at in gaming purchases as well.”
In the module aimed at Year 9 and 10, the focus is on work.
“So age appropriate for starting or thinking about work, that you have rights at work, that there are pay rates that you can look up online for your type of job, how to have a difficult conversation with your manager or trusted adult if things aren’t being paid in the right amount," West explains.
“And then reading payslips and your tax and super on your payslips and what super is and how your balance accumulates, but also how fees come out of your super accounts.”
The fourth workshop module covers becoming scam savvy, which helps high school students recognise scam red flags and stay safe online.
West says a range of school staff in different roles contact Ecstra to arrange their workshops.
“It can be a maths teacher, an economics teacher, a business teacher, it can be the wellbeing officer, it can be the careers guidance officer,” West shares.
She believes that rather than being piecemeal across a broad range of curriculum areas, she’d love to see it given priority as a stand-alone.
Dr Tracey West would like to see financial education as a specialty, semester-long subject, taught by teachers with some professional learning, providing essential foundational skills and knowledge for students.
“I think it needs to be a specialty semester-long subject, where when, if that is required in the curriculum, say around that Year 9 or Year 10 level, then the teachers responsible for that have to have some support, some professional learning, [a support network], some curriculum guidance laid out for them, so that it can be taught with confidence and the essential foundational skills and knowledge taught to get students feeling more comfortable with doing this sort of thing.
“The issue is also teacher confidence and that there aren’t the wraparound resources to help them provide the financial landscape and context for this.”
So when’s a good time to start financial literacy education?
“That’s an excellent question. I know in WA they are starting to embed it and have a deeper look at it in primary school and even lower primary school. So they’re starting earlier, which is the right thing to do," West explains.
“The new Irish national financial literacy strategy is specifically looking to embed it into primary school, but obviously it needs to be age appropriate as well.
“If you were limited to a standalone personal finance course, it needs to be when they’re starting to think about work and what they’re going to do with the money that they’re earning, so those later school years are a no-brainer, but there’s a whole literacy around money, it has its own language and terminology, so if you can start that earlier, that’s great.”
Decades ago, Australia was at the forefront of financial literacy globally, with what’s now called the National Financial Capability Strategy.
“With ASIC until 2018, [Government] was doing a lot with their Money Smart information on the website, plus some school initiatives and investment in schools as well. Then it moved to Treasury, and it has been a little dormant since then,” West laments.
In the United States, there are currently 27 states that have a compulsory personal finance component before a student can graduate from high school, while in New Zealand a new financial capabilities strategy has just been released with a focus on how to better coordinate financial literacy in schools.
There needs to be a professional development body here in Australia, West says.
“An association that can provide teachers with ongoing professional development support and would also frame the week-by-week curriculum and supporting materials, with input from the economists, the civics and citizenship people, as well as the financial literacy people.
“The challenge would be apolitical facts and figures etc, and that would be the challenge when it is top-down directed, along with time to gain buy-in from principals as well as teachers.
“At Extra Foundation we’re starting conversations, which is why I’m proud of the program.”
