Finance lessons ‘could cut debt burden’

Alastair Mathews, director of policy at the Personal Finance Education Group (PFEG), has welcomed the government’s plan to extend the provision of personal finance lessons and suggested that the new measures might go some way to establishing a less indebted society.

“Personal finance education is not going to necessarily turn everybody into a totally savvy consumer overnight. But doing it, we believe, is much better than not doing it,” he said.

“We’ve got quite a lot of experience with schools who, with our help, have developed financial education and have found it a very productive area to work in.”

And with the levels of personal debt soaring nationwide, Mr Mathews went on to suggest that the financial education currently being offered schoolchildren in UK has been far from sufficient in recent years.

Figures from Credit Action show that the UK’s overall debt management burden increases by close to one million pounds every four minutes.