Key takeaways
- Financial content sits in two statutory subjects in England, citizenship and maths, and the citizenship money content is two bullet points covering key stages 3 and 4 only.
- Academies and private schools don't have to follow the national curriculum, and 83.0% of secondary schools were academies or free schools in 2024/25, teaching 82.7% of secondary pupils.
- GCSE Citizenship Studies took 22,130 provisional entries for summer 2026, against 876,955 for maths, out of 5,840,185 GCSE entries in total.
- A 22-year-old on £30,000 in 2026/27 sees £543.19 a month leave a £2,500 payslip across four deductions, which is 21.7% of gross pay.
- In 76 randomised experiments covering more than 160,000 people, financial education moved behaviour by 0.0898 standard deviations and knowledge by 0.187.
The short answer, and the two subjects it hides in
Yes, partly, and it depends on what kind of school you're asking about.
Financial content isn't a subject of its own. The Department for Education's national curriculum collection publishes statutory programmes of study for twelve subjects, and financial education isn't among them. The money content is split between citizenship and mathematics instead, and the citizenship half only exists at secondary level. DfE published the citizenship programmes of study for key stages 3 and 4 on 11 September 2013, and last updated the mathematics ones on 28 September 2021. Both apply to England, and "the majority of this national curriculum was introduced in September 2014".
That is the ceiling. The floor is lower, because the national curriculum binds only maintained schools. DfE says "all local-authority-maintained schools in England must teach these programmes of study", and GOV.UK adds that "other types of school, like academies and private schools, do not have to follow the national curriculum." In the 2024/25 academic year, 83.0% of secondary schools in England were academies or free schools. So the statutory answer reaches roughly one secondary school in six.
What financial literacy in schools covers at key stages 3 and 4
The citizenship curriculum's financial content is two bullet points, one per key stage. That's not a summary of it. It's the whole thing.
At key stage 3, pupils should be taught "the functions and uses of money, the importance and practice of budgeting, and managing risk". At key stage 4, the list grows to "income and expenditure, credit and debt, insurance, savings and pensions, financial products and services, and how public money is raised and spent".
The stated purpose is more ambitious than the list. Teaching should "prepare pupils to take their place in society as responsible citizens, manage their money well and make sound financial decisions". The aims add that pupils should be equipped "to manage their money on a day-to-day basis, and plan for future financial needs".
Here's what the document does not contain. Search the whole 2013 citizenship publication and the words "tax", "National Insurance", "student loan", "payslip" and "minimum wage" appear zero times. "Pension" appears once, inside that key stage 4 list. "Income" appears once, in the same list. Personal, social, health and economic education covers more of this ground, and GOV.UK files it under "other curriculum subjects" as guidance rather than statutory programmes of study.
Maths teaches the percentages and names none of the deductions
Maths is where the calculation lives. The mathematics programmes of study, last updated on 28 September 2021, open by calling the subject "necessary for financial literacy and most forms of employment". The content behind that claim is thinner than the claim.
At key stage 3, pupils should "develop their use of formal mathematical knowledge to interpret and solve problems, including in financial mathematics", and should "solve problems involving percentage change, including: percentage increase, decrease and original value problems and simple interest in financial mathematics". At key stage 4 the equivalent lines ask pupils to solve problems "including in financial contexts" and to "set up, solve and interpret the answers in growth and decay problems, including compound interest".
A third key stage 4 reference, to "graphs in financial contexts", sits inside the curly braces the document reserves for "additional mathematical content to be taught to more highly attaining pupils". So it isn't content for everyone.
That leaves simple interest, compound interest and one unspecified mention of financial contexts as the named financial content for all pupils across both key stages. Across the entire mathematics programmes of study, covering key stages 1 to 4, the words "tax", "income", "wage", "insurance", "pension", "National Insurance" and "student loan" appear zero times. A pupil leaves with the percentage machinery and no named application for it.
83.0% of secondary schools do not have to teach any of it
This is the part of the gap most arguments skip. The Department for Education's school census for the 2024/25 academic year reports that "83.0% of secondary schools are academies or free schools, accounting for 82.7% of secondary school pupils". Primary conversion is lower, at 46.1% of schools and 47.3% of pupils.
Academies aren't unregulated. GOV.UK says they "must teach a broad and balanced curriculum including English, maths and science" and "must also teach relationships and sex education, and religious education". Maths is on that list, so the simple-interest line survives the exemption. Citizenship isn't, so the key stage 4 list of income, credit, insurance, savings and pensions does not.
So the honest description of financial literacy in schools in England is a statutory requirement that, by 2024/25, reached a minority of secondary schools directly. Many academies follow the national curriculum anyway, and nothing cited here measures how many. The point is narrower: the requirement is not what binds them.
The subject carrying the money content took 22,130 GCSE entries
Examination entries show where a subject gets timetable priority. Ofqual's provisional entries for the summer 2026 exam series, published on 9 June 2026, put GCSE Citizenship Studies at 22,130 entries. GCSE Mathematics took 876,955. Total GCSE entries were 5,840,185.
Citizenship Studies is therefore 2.5% of the size of maths, and 0.4% of all GCSE entries. Statutory citizenship teaching doesn't require a GCSE entry, so this isn't a measure of how many pupils met the content. It is a measure of how many were examined on it, and the answer is one in 264 GCSE entries.
What a first payslip asks you to work out in month one
Now the other side of the gap. First payslip deductions in the 2026 to 2027 tax year run to four separate lines on a full-time salary, each with its own threshold, and none of them is named in either programme of study.
Income tax takes 20% above a £12,570 Personal Allowance. Class 1 National Insurance takes 8% of pay between £1,048 and £4,189 a month. A Plan 5 student loan takes 9% above £25,000 a year, or £2,083 a month. Automatic enrolment takes 5% of earnings between £6,240 and £50,270 a year, with the employer adding 3% for a total minimum of 8%, rates in force since April 2019.
Here's the arithmetic for a worker aged 22 or over, auto-enrolled at the minimum, repaying a Plan 5 loan, under 2026/27 thresholds.
| Annual salary | Monthly gross | Income tax | National Insurance | Plan 5 loan | Pension 5% | Total out | Take-home |
|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|
| £21,000 | £1,750.00 | £140.50 | £56.16 | £0.00 | £61.50 | £258.16 | £1,491.84 |
| £25,000 | £2,083.33 | £207.17 | £82.83 | £0.03 | £78.17 | £368.19 | £1,715.14 |
| £30,000 | £2,500.00 | £290.50 | £116.16 | £37.53 | £99.00 | £543.19 | £1,956.81 |
| £40,000 | £3,333.33 | £457.17 | £182.83 | £112.53 | £140.67 | £893.19 | £2,440.14 |
At £21,000 the four deductions take 14.8% of gross pay. At £40,000 they take 26.8%. The chart above breaks the £30,000 row into its four parts, and the shape is the lesson: income tax is the biggest single line, but the other three together come to £252.69 a month, which is 87% of the tax bill.
Every one of those four deductions turns on a threshold set by policy rather than by anything a pupil could derive from first principles. We've covered the income tax threshold freeze and the student loan Plan 2 threshold freeze separately, and neither mechanism appears in any programme of study either.
The 22nd birthday nobody mentions
Automatic enrolment has an age floor that quietly reshapes a young worker's payslip. GOV.UK sets the condition as being "aged between 22 and State Pension age" and earning "at least £10,000 per year".
So an 18-year-old isn't auto-enrolled, whatever they earn. On the April 2026 minimum wage of £10.85 an hour for 18 to 20 year olds, 37.5 hours a week comes to £21,157.50 a year, or £1,763.13 a month. Income tax takes £143.13 and National Insurance £57.21, so £200.34 leaves the payslip and 88.6% stays. No pension line appears at all.
Then a birthday arrives and the pension column switches on. The deduction is the worker's own money going into their own pension, not a tax, but it leaves the payslip looking like a pay cut. That's the moment auto enrolment minimum contributions stop being an abstraction, and it's also the moment nothing in either programme of study has prepared for.
The marginal picture is starker. For a Plan 5 graduate aged 22 or over earning above £25,000, each extra pound of gross pay loses 20p to income tax, 8p to National Insurance, 9p to the loan and 5p to the pension. That's 42p out of every extra pound, of which 5p is their own saving. GOV.UK already publishes the minimum wage for April 2027 at £13.21 an hour for workers aged 21 and over, which changes the gross without touching that structure.
The strongest case against a bigger curriculum is the effect size
There's a serious objection to all of this, and it isn't that the gap is imaginary. The case for more financial education in schools rests on an assumption that lessons change what people do with money, and the experimental evidence on that is weaker than the campaign for it.
The most comprehensive evidence is a meta-analysis by Tim Kaiser, Annamaria Lusardi, Lukas Menkhoff and Carly Urban, circulated as NBER Working Paper 27057 in April 2020. They pooled 76 randomised experiments with more than 160,000 participants across 33 countries. Their preferred estimate puts the average treatment effect of financial education at 0.1003 standard deviations, with a 95% confidence interval from 0.071 to 0.129.
Split by outcome, the raw averages diverge. Financial knowledge moved 0.187 standard deviations. Financial behaviour moved 0.0898. The authors note it is "more difficult to affect long-run outcomes that are not directly addressed in the intervention", which is a polite way of saying that teaching people things is easier than changing what they do.
On the benchmark the paper itself adopts, from Kraft (2019), "effects larger than 0.20 standard deviations are 'large,' effects between 0.05 and 0.20 standard deviations are 'medium,' and effects under 0.05 standard deviations are 'small.'" So the knowledge effect sits at the top of medium, and the behaviour effect sits near the bottom of it.
Dosage matters too. The average study in the sample delivered 11.71 hours of instruction, with a median of 7 hours, and outcomes were measured on average 30.4 weeks later. That is a lot more contact time than two statutory bullet points imply, for an effect that is real but modest.
The counter-counter-argument is that the earlier literature was worse. Fernandes and colleagues, in 2014, pooled 13 randomised trials and found an effect more than five times smaller than this paper's estimate. The field grew, the estimate rose, and the honest reading is that nobody should treat the 2014 figure as settled either.
What the adult numbers look like at the other end
The Financial Conduct Authority's Financial Lives survey interviewed 17,950 UK adults between 5 February and 16 June 2024. Three of its findings bear on this.
First, numeracy. "In 2024, 9.8 million adults (18%) demonstrated poor financial numeracy, answering none of the three questions correctly." Younger adults did worse, at "29% for those aged 18-24 vs. 12% for those aged 55+".
Second, resilience. "In May 2024, 13.1 million adults (24%) had low financial resilience."
Third, the two behaviours closest to a first payslip. Among non-retirees, 18 to 24 year olds were among the least likely to be contributing to a pension, at 30%. Use of high-cost credit "was highest among those aged 18-24 (12%)".
None of that is evidence about the curriculum. It's a cross-sectional survey, and it cannot separate what someone was taught at 15 from their income, their housing costs or their age. It does establish that the decisions the curriculum gestures at are being made badly by a measurable minority, which is a different and weaker claim than the one campaigners usually make.
What this evidence cannot tell you
The curriculum documents say what must be taught. They don't say what is taught, and nothing cited here measures classroom hours on money in England. A school with two statutory bullet points might spend a term on them. Another might spend twenty minutes.
The academy share is a fact about legal obligation, not about practice. Plenty of academies follow the national curriculum voluntarily, and the 83.0% figure says nothing about how many.
The GCSE entry count measures examination, not teaching, and citizenship teaching at key stage 4 is statutory in maintained schools whether or not anyone sits the paper.
The meta-analysis is a global sample of 33 countries. Most of its interventions aren't English school mandates, many outcomes are self-reported, and NBER working papers haven't been peer-reviewed. Its authors say the evidence on whether effects persist is inconclusive, though they find no dramatic decay within six months.
The payslip table is one set of assumptions, not a forecast. It assumes a Plan 5 loan, auto-enrolment at the statutory minimum, no salary sacrifice, no benefits in kind and no Scottish income tax bands, which differ. Change any of those and the rows change.
What would change the conclusion
If the academy exemption went, the statutory reach of the money content would move from roughly 17.0% of secondary schools to all of them overnight, with no change to a single word of the 2013 programmes of study. That is the single largest lever in the whole picture, and it isn't a curriculum lever.
If a measure of taught hours existed, the argument would change shape. At the moment both sides are arguing about statutory text because nobody has the delivery data, and the meta-analysis says dosage is what moves the estimate.
If a programme of study named the deductions, the comparison would get testable. "Income and expenditure" is not the same instruction as "PAYE, Class 1 National Insurance, Plan 5 and automatic enrolment", and only one of those produces a pupil who can read the four lines on their own payslip.
If a school-mandate trial in England reported above 0.20 standard deviations on behaviour, the effect-size objection would collapse. Nothing in the 76 studies gets there on behaviour today.
The number worth watching isn't how many words the curriculum devotes to money. It's the gap between two statutory bullet points and four simultaneous deductions on a first payslip, and that gap is currently £543.19 a month at £30,000.