Nobody Taught Me About Monday

Last week, the government announced that financial education will become compulsory in primary schools. From September 2028, children from Year 1 upwards will be taught about budgeting, savings, debt and interest as part of the national curriculum. It was greeted as a milestone — a long-overdue recognition that we have been setting children up to fail. I read it and felt two things at once: relief, and a quiet fury that it took this long.

I’m 31. I’ve been investing for ten years. And not a single lesson of that financial education came from a classroom.

What school actually taught us about money

Think back to your school years. Twelve years of your life. Thousands of lessons. You were taught to construct a sentence, calculate the circumference of a circle and identify the causes of the First World War. You may have dissected something. You almost certainly spent time in a drama class improvising scenes nobody asked for. What you were almost certainly not taught was how money works.

Not a word about mortgages. Not a mention of interest rates. Nobody sat you down and explained what a pension actually is, why starting one at 22 rather than 32 is not a trivial difference, or what the gap between an accumulation fund and an income fund means for your retirement. Nobody showed you what university debt looks like when you are a 22-year-old trying to build a life — not as an abstract number, but as a monthly reality that sits alongside rent, energy bills and a starting salary that probably doesn’t cover all three comfortably.

The guidance was simpler than that: work hard, get your grades, go to university, be successful. That was the financial plan. The entire financial plan.

The evidence is damning

This is not just personal experience. A landmark study by abrdn this year found that 44% of UK adults — 23.3 million people — fall into the “poor” or “very poor” category for financial literacy. That figure is larger than the entire population of Australia. All of those people are moving through their financial lives without the foundational tools to make informed decisions.

The abrdn study found that just 28% of adults could answer all three of its basic financial literacy questions correctly. A separate survey by Lightyear paints an even bleaker picture: only 23% of UK adults passed a financial knowledge test in 2026 — down from 49% the year before. Two different studies, two different methodologies, one consistent conclusion. We are not standing still on this. We are going backwards.

The group with the worst scores? 18 to 24-year-olds. The people who just left school. 56% of them cannot explain how pension planning works. More than half, going out into a world of mortgages, ISA allowances, employer contributions and compound interest — without anyone having explained a single one of those things to them.

And that ignorance has a cost that can be precisely measured. People with poor financial literacy retire with pension pots that are, on average, £20,000 smaller. Not because they earned less. Not because they worked less hard. Because nobody taught them how to make their money work. That is the price of this failure, compounded over a working lifetime.

I wasn’t any different

I am not telling this story from a position of having figured it all out. I arrived at investing entirely by accident, and my early decisions were far from perfect.

I grew up in a normal family. My parents gave me the values of money in the way their parents had passed it to them — careful spending, save where you can, don’t live beyond your means. It was honest and it was good. But it wasn’t structured. We didn’t talk about funds or pensions. We didn’t discuss whether buying or renting made more sense at what stage of life, or what the long-term implications of student debt actually looked like beyond the monthly repayment figure. Financial literacy in my household was inherited instinct, not formal knowledge.

My interest in investing came from a single, throwaway comment by a distant relative from the other side of the Atlantic. One observation. That was the pivot. That was the moment the path forked. And I am acutely aware of how random that was. Most of my friends never had that conversation. They still haven’t.

I opened a Hargreaves Lansdown account and put in £100. My first investment was the FTSE 100 — at an all-time high, which, if you understand anything about entry points, is not where you want to begin. But every evening after work I would open that account and watch the balance move. Up a few pennies. Down a few pennies. And something clicked.

It wasn’t the money — not yet. It was the realisation of what it could become. Two and a half years later I had £15,000 and could see real, noticeable annual gains. I was becoming that person — the one who corners you at a gathering and explains, unbidden, why the accumulation version of a fund reinvests its returns while the income version pays them out, and why that distinction matters enormously over time. Nobody asked. I didn’t let that stop me. The passion was lit, and it has never gone out.

Ten years later, that is why this channel exists.

The chart nobody showed you at 18

Here is the thing that stays with me. The concept of compound interest — the idea that your returns generate their own returns, accelerating over time — takes about thirty seconds to understand when someone draws it out for you. It requires no prior knowledge. No financial background. Nothing except a willingness to look at a simple chart.

If someone had shown me that chart at 18, it would have changed the way I thought about every payslip for the rest of my life.

That is what £100 a month looks like over time. Not a fortune to start. Not a specialist salary. A hundred pounds a month, invested consistently, left to compound at a broadly achievable long-run average of 8% annually. The number at the end is not magic — it is just mathematics, applied over time. And the only reason most people never start is that nobody told them this was possible before the habit of spending everything became fixed.

We had time for drama, though

A university degree in England now costs over £60,000 once you factor in tuition fees, accommodation and living expenses across three years. Graduates do, on average, earn 32 to 37% more than non-graduates by the time they reach 31. That is a meaningful premium — in the right circumstances, for the right subject.

But nobody told you at 17 that the subject matters enormously. Nobody ran you through what a creative arts degree from a lower-ranked institution realistically leads to in terms of lifetime earnings compared to, say, engineering, medicine or economics. Nobody mentioned that degree apprenticeships exist — that you can graduate with a full qualification, genuine workplace experience and zero debt, having been paid a salary throughout. And nobody asked whether the £60,000 you were about to commit to was the best use of that money at that age, for your particular goals.

We weren’t shown any of that. We were told university was the path — largely, I think, because the people telling us had taken that path themselves. Teachers go to university and become teachers. It becomes the blueprint they naturally hand forward. That is not a criticism of teachers. My mother is one, and she is exceptional at what she does. But a profession built on education has a blind spot when it comes to the one subject that will shape every adult’s life more than any other.

It’s a language. Teach it young.

Learning a language at five is effortless. The brain absorbs it, internalises it, builds intuition around it without conscious effort. Learning that same language at 40 is entirely possible — but it is a struggle, not because of intelligence, but because the window for effortless absorption has passed. You have to consciously fight against the patterns already established.

Financial literacy works the same way. Introduce a child to compound interest at seven, and by the time they receive their first Saturday job payslip, they already understand intuitively what saving a portion of it means over time. They understand what an ISA is, why a pension matters, how interest works in their favour or against them. Leave it until adulthood — when there are rent payments, credit cards, mortgages and an entire accumulated history of financial decisions already made — and the whole thing feels overwhelming. Too many products. Too much jargon. Too much ground to cover.

The new curriculum is a genuine step in the right direction. Children from Year 1 learning about budgeting and savings by 2028 is progress that people have fought hard for. But let us also be honest about what that announcement quietly admits: that right now, today, millions of children are sitting in classrooms that are not giving them these tools. And the curriculum content that already exists for secondary schools — introduced in 2014 — is, according to the government’s own review, “not always taught” in practice.

A policy change and the actual delivery of that policy are two different things. We have had twelve years of secondary financial education that only a third of children recall finding useful. The next challenge is making sure 2028 is the year it actually lands — not just the year it was announced.

Why this channel exists

I have thought about that distant relative’s comment many times. One observation, from someone I barely knew, redirected the entire trajectory of my financial life. The interest I found was not the result of discipline or planning — it was luck. The right person, at the right moment, saying the right thing in passing.

Most people do not get that moment. Most people figure it out later, if at all, through mistakes that are expensive precisely because they were preventable. I made plenty of those mistakes too — buying the FTSE at an all-time high being one of the more instructive early ones.

That is what this channel is trying to be: the conversation that should have happened in school. Not investing dressed up as exciting or glamorous, because it is not always either of those things. Just the basics, explained clearly and honestly, at a point when they can still do the most good. Because the thing I have come to believe after ten years of doing this is that it really isn’t that complicated — not if someone explains it plainly, and not if you start early enough for time to do the work for you.

Financial literacy is not a specialist skill. It is a life skill. And we have been treating it like an optional extra for far too long.