Published by Relm Research Ltd | relmresearch.org
Behavioural Science | Financial Education | Policy
On 5 November 2025, something genuinely significant happened in UK education policy. Professor Becky Francis published the final report of the Curriculum and Assessment Review, and the government responded the same day with a commitment that, for the first time in English education history, financial literacy would become a compulsory part of the primary school curriculum — embedded within a newly statutory Citizenship subject at Key Stages 1 and 2 (Department for Education [DfE], 2025a). Secondary content will be strengthened too, with particular attention to digital financial literacy: fraud, scams, and the behavioural risks unique to an economy increasingly mediated by screens (DfE, 2025b). First teaching is confirmed for September 2028, with the final revised curriculum due for publication by spring 2027 (DfE, 2025a).
It is, on its face, a landmark moment. And those of us working at the intersection of behavioural science and financial education have every reason to acknowledge that. Financial literacy campaigners, including MoneySavingExpert’s Martin Lewis, have spent over a decade pushing for exactly this — and the reform’s architects clearly engaged with the evidence that what children do not learn about money in school, they tend to learn the hard way in adulthood.
But a policy announcement is not an outcome. And there is a history here that the 2028 reform urgently needs to reckon with — because the UK has been in this position before.
We Have Already Done This Once
In 2014, financial education became compulsory in the Citizenship curriculum for 11 to 16-year-olds in English maintained secondary schools (House of Lords Library, 2024). At the time, it was celebrated as a significant step forward. Over a decade later, the evidence presents a sobering picture.
Despite financial education being compulsory in Citizenship since 2014, only a third of children recall learning about money at school (IFA Magazine, 2025) — a statistic drawn from the Money and Pensions Service’s own research base and cited in the government’s curriculum review documentation. 38% of secondary school students say they have never been taught about personal finances, and 64% say that what they have been taught will not set them up for life (IFA Magazine, 2025). Those are not marginal figures. They represent the dominant experience of young people who were supposed to be covered by a statutory entitlement.
A 2016 APPG inquiry asked whether the 2014 reform had truly done its job; the answer was a resounding no — yet limited educational reform since then meant that curriculum and content stayed largely static for a decade (House of Lords Library, 2024). Martin Lewis, who had campaigned hardest for the original reform, later described his victory as “pyrrhic” — welcome in principle, hollowed out in practice by a lack of resourcing and the structural freedoms granted to academies and free schools to diverge from the national curriculum (MoneySavingExpert, 2024).
That last point matters enormously. As of January 2026, 83.9% of secondary schools are academies or free schools, accounting for 83.6% of secondary school pupils (Department for Education, 2026). Academies are not legally bound to follow the national curriculum. Financial education provision is not assessed or monitored regularly, which means there are discrepancies in the quality and delivery of teaching affecting the learning and development of young people. Research has found that the financial skills of 15-year-olds from socio-economically disadvantaged backgrounds are four years behind those from advantaged backgrounds, and that they are less likely to learn about money in school (Centre for Financial Capability, 2024).
The financial services industry estimates it is reaching only 40% of school children through voluntary financial education provision (UK Finance, 2024). Even accounting for overlap with the statutory offer, those numbers do not suggest a system delivering on its commitments.
The 2028 reform needs to be honest with itself about why this happened — and its answer cannot simply be “this time we will make it even more compulsory.” Statute, on its own, has never been the problem.
The Deeper Problem: Knowledge Is Not Behaviour
There is a second failure mode embedded within the 2014 reform that is arguably more fundamental than the delivery shortfall — and it runs directly through the intellectual foundations of financial education as a field.
The dominant model underlying most UK financial education programmes is essentially cognitive: teach young people what a budget is, how interest works, what a credit score means, and they will make better financial decisions as adults. It is an appealing model. It maps onto how schools generally work — you learn something, you are assessed on whether you learned it, and the learning is assumed to generalise.
The problem is that a substantial body of academic evidence does not support this assumption when it comes to financial behaviour. Fernandes et al.’s (2014) landmark meta-analysis of 201 studies across 168 papers found that interventions to improve financial literacy explain only 0.1% of the variance in financial behaviours studied, with weaker effects in low-income samples. Like other education, financial education decays over time; even large interventions with many hours of instruction have negligible effects on behaviour 20 months or more from the time of intervention.
That is not a niche academic finding. It is one of the most cited results in the financial education literature, and it has been consistently replicated. Despite decades of effort and billions invested, most financial literacy programmes around the world struggle to create lasting change, especially in low-income communities where poverty is the norm (World Economic Forum, 2025). The World Economic Forum (2025), summarising the World Bank’s Global Findex findings, frames this explicitly: real financial literacy requires going beyond budgets to behaviour — understanding the underlying reasons people act and think in the ways they do about money.
This distinction is not semantic. It is structural. A curriculum that teaches what without addressing why, when and how people actually decide is not a weak version of what we need — it is a categorically different thing. And it is, broadly, what the 2014 secondary curriculum delivered: knowledge content, embedded in Citizenship, assessed through the same mechanisms as other Citizenship content, with no particular framework for turning that knowledge into durable financial behaviour.
Only 17% of teachers feel confident delivering financial education (UK Parliament, 2024) — which should not surprise anyone. Teachers trained in Citizenship have not typically been trained in the psychology of financial decision-making, in behaviour change frameworks, or in the pedagogical methods that bridge the knowing-doing gap. Asking them to deliver financial behaviour change through a knowledge-focused curriculum, without adequate training or a supporting framework, is asking a lot.
What a Behaviourally Informed Curriculum Actually Looks Like
So what would it actually mean to design a financial education curriculum that takes behavioural science seriously — not as a theoretical overlay, but as the organising logic of the whole enterprise?
At Relm Research, this is the question our work is built around. Financial literacy is a behavioural problem, not a knowledge problem. The two are related — you cannot make good decisions entirely without relevant information — but literacy in isolation is demonstrably insufficient. Behaviour is shaped by psychology, social context, structural environment, and the design of the moments in which decisions actually happen. A curriculum that ignores these dimensions is not educating for financial capability; it is producing financial awareness, which is a much thinner thing.
This is precisely the design logic behind Relm’s 7-Dimensional Educational Architecture (7-DEA): a facilitator-facing framework that moves curriculum content beyond topic coverage into behaviourally grounded sequencing. The 7-DEA is not another list of financial topics. It is a design system for the how of financial education — mapping learning objectives across seven dimensions of financial life, integrating behavioural drivers at each stage, and ensuring that the pathway from knowledge to habit is deliberately engineered rather than assumed. For schools, multi-academy trusts, EdTech developers and curriculum publishers building for the 2028 reform, it provides what the 2014 curriculum never had: a principled framework for translating statute into pedagogically coherent delivery.
But curriculum design is only part of the answer. The 2014 reform’s second structural failure was an evaluation problem: because financial education was not assessed in any meaningful way, there was no mechanism for identifying, at scale, which programmes were working and which were not. The result was a decade of well-intentioned delivery with no feedback loop. The KSBA Evaluation Framework (Knowledge, Skills, Behaviours, Attitudes) is designed to address exactly this — separating the four distinct dimensions of financial capability development and providing educators with a structured way to assess whether learning has translated into the behavioural and attitudinal change that actually predicts long-term financial wellbeing.
And underlying both, the Relm Standard for Behaviourally Informed Financial Education (The Brainwave Bar) provides the accreditation architecture that ties the whole system together — a formal quality framework that programmes, platforms and providers can be assessed against, creating the kind of sector-level accountability that financial education has conspicuously lacked since 2014.
The Window Is Open — But It Will Not Stay Open
The final curriculum will be published in spring 2027, and schools will start teaching it from September 2028 (Department for Education, 2025a). That gives the field approximately eighteen months from curriculum publication to first teaching — four terms for schools, curriculum designers, EdTech providers and teacher trainers to build the systems that will determine whether the 2028 reform succeeds where 2014 did not.
The CBI has estimated that greater financial literacy could add £7 billion to the UK economy and create more than 120,000 jobs every year (HWRK Magazine, 2026). 71% of 7 to 17-year-olds are already making online purchases, and two-thirds do so without adult supervision (HWRK Magazine, 2026). These young people are already financial actors. The question is not whether they will engage with money — they already are. The question is whether the education system that is supposed to prepare them will do so with enough intellectual seriousness to actually change how they behave.
That requires more than intent. It requires a curriculum model with genuine behavioural grounding, a pedagogy that bridges the knowing-doing gap, and an evaluation framework rigorous enough to distinguish between pupils who can describe a budget and pupils who have developed the attitudes and habits to maintain one under real-world financial pressure. It requires, in short, the kind of frameworks that behavioural science has been developing for decades — and that financial education has been, until now, largely too siloed to adopt.
The 2028 reform is the right policy. The statute is necessary. But statute is not the end of the argument — it is the beginning of it. The real test of what gets announced in spring 2027 is whether the system built behind the curriculum is as considered as the curriculum itself.
That is the work. And the window, for once, is open.
If This Resonates — Join the Conversation
Financial education policy is at an inflection point, and the decisions made in the next eighteen months will shape a generation’s relationship with money. We want to hear from you.
What do you think the 2028 reform gets right — and where are the gaps? Share your perspective in the comments, or reach out directly at relmresearch.org.
If this piece has been useful, pass it on to a colleague in education, policy, or EdTech who is thinking about the 2028 curriculum. The conversation is better when more people are in it.
And if you would like to explore how Relm’s frameworks — the 7-DEA, KSBA, and Relm Standard — could inform your programme design or accreditation strategy, we would welcome a conversation.
→ Like this article | Comment below | Share with your network
Follow Relm Research on LinkedIn and Instagram [@RelmResearch] for weekly thinking at the intersection of behavioural science and financial education.
Bibliography
Centre for Financial Capability. (2024, January). Written evidence submitted to the Education Committee [FE0052]. UK Parliament. https://committees.parliament.uk/writtenevidence/127115/pdf/
Department for Education. (2025a). New curriculum to give young people the skills for life and work [Press release]. GOV.UK. https://www.gov.uk/government/news/new-curriculum-to-give-young-people-the-skills-for-life-and-work
Department for Education. (2025b). Government response to the Curriculum and Assessment Review. GOV.UK. https://assets.publishing.service.gov.uk/media/690b2a4a14b040dfe82922ea/Government_response_to_the_Curriculum_and_Assessment_Review.pdf
Department for Education. (2026, June). Schools, pupils and their characteristics: January 2026. Explore Education Statistics. https://explore-education-statistics.service.gov.uk/find-statistics/school-pupils-and-their-characteristics/2025-26
Fernandes, D., Lynch, J. G., Jr., & Netemeyer, R. G. (2014). Financial literacy, financial education, and downstream financial behaviors. Management Science, 60(8), 1861–1883. https://doi.org/10.1287/mnsc.2013.1849
House of Lords Library. (2024, January 24). Financial education in schools. UK Parliament. https://lordslibrary.parliament.uk/financial-education-in-schools/
HWRK Magazine. (2026, March 30). Financial education: A policy win? https://hwrkmagazine.co.uk/financial-education/
MoneySavingExpert. (2024, May 22). MPs finally call for compulsory financial education in English primary and secondary schools after damning evidence from Martin Lewis and others. https://www.moneysavingexpert.com/news/2024/05/martin-lewis-financial-education-committee/
Professional Pensions. (2025, November 5). All children to be taught financial literacy as part of curriculum review. Professional Pensions. https://www.professionalpensions.com/news/4521415/children-taught-financial-literacy-curriculum-review
UK Finance. (2024). Financial education report 2024: Building a better society. https://www.ukfinance.org.uk/system/files/2024-09/Financial%20Education%20Report%202024.pdf
UK Parliament. (2024). Written evidence submitted by Gabriella Bedford [FE0011]. https://committees.parliament.uk/writtenevidence/126941/pdf/
World Economic Forum. (2025, October). Real financial literacy goes beyond budgets to behaviour. https://www.weforum.org/stories/2025/10/financial-literacy-beyond-budgets-to-behaviour/
Leave a Reply