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At Tawa Intermediate life isn't fair. Some families earn buckets and buy everything new, while others scrape by on a single low income.

Welcome to adulthood, kids, as taught in financial literacy classes.

The 11 and 12-year-olds pull their incomes out of a hat and then "families" budget for food, electricity, loan repayments and shelter.

Some are on benefits, some have one parent, and, no, unlike some governments, the teachers will not print more money.

Fridays are tricky – that's when teachers hit families with random expenses such as dentists' bills or unexpected doctor's visits.

Sound familiar?

This one might, too. In another lesson pupils must choose between blowing their "wages" on a treat or saving up for something better at the end of the term. School sleepovers are popular, but not every kid gets to come, says principal Carolyn Stuart.

"We are tough enough to hold them to it ... you can't spend it twice," she says. "The ones that learn the most are the ones that didn't [save]."

Pushpa Wood, head of Massey University's new Centre for Personal Financial Education, would like every child to learn these kinds of lessons.

The former education manager for the Commission for Financial Literacy and Retirement Income (CFLRI) worries about what will happen in 30 years' time if today's children do not learn to live within their means. After all, New Zealand is dealing with the consequences of a decade-long orgy of debt-fuelled consumer spending.

"The whole concept of delayed gratification is very important," Wood says.

"[Learning] that it is not a bad idea not to have everything, that you are not terribly disadvantaged if you haven't got an iPhone."

To Wood and Stuart – chairwoman of the CFLRI's schools advisory group – financial literacy is as important for students to master as the core literacy and numeracy subjects.

The Education Ministry does not necessarily agree.

Financial literacy is not a core subject and there are no plans to make it one.

The ministry has produced resources for schools that want to teach financial literacy (sample topic: The Real Cost of Pets) and is looking at developing three online financial literacy teaching units, a spokesman said by email. But any requirements to teach it are loose.

"There's no set curriculum or syllabus, really, as what should be taught," says Kevin South, head of the business faculty at Newlands College.

"At Newlands College it hasn't been compulsory because the senior management team has been a bit uncertain as to how strong the requirement is, and perhaps that needs to be cleared up a little bit."

About half of Newlands College pupils choose to take it and the school is considering making it compulsory next year for all first-year students to learn basic budgeting, income and consumer law. South says there is plenty of material out there for schools that want to teach it and plenty of flexibility to be creative.

"The advantage of it being a bit loose is that you can tailor it to your school," he says.

The flexibility means many schools choose not to teach it.

Preliminary results from a New Zealand Educational Institute phone survey of 200 primary schools in Auckland and Nelson, carried out for CFLRI, suggest about 40 per cent of primary schools do not teach financial literacy, says Sandie Aikin, a senior officer at the institute and a member of the schools advisory group.

A survey of high schools is coming. The most commonly given reason for not offering it was that teachers could not find the time, Aikin says.

The option of having an outside expert visit schools from a bank or elsewhere is helpful but not ideal, she says.

"What you want is teachers, maybe supported by an expert, talking to students about it, because unless teachers are involved they are unlikely to pick it up in any other environment apart from the one-off thing that the expert does, which is a bit of a waste of time really.

"If you want it to become an integral part of the curriculum then you must provide the professional development and the training that's required for teachers."

The latest progress report on the national strategy for financial literacy in December noted the Education Ministry (through its contractors) offered free support for schools wanting professional development in financial literacy but that "to date there has been little demand from schools".

Stuart is sympathetic to schools that say they can't offer it.

"We've got what you could only describe as overcrowded curriculum," she says.

"There is huge tension between trying to deliver a 21st century curriculum, of which financial literacy is a really important part, and all of the compliance stuff that's being pushed on us as well."

With the focus on literacy and numeracy, other subjects have risked being pushed to one side, she says.

Teachers often spend longer going over the finer details of simultaneous equations than they do teaching financial literacy.

"For some kids, that [equation] is really important knowledge. But every child needs to know how to do finance and how to calculate interest rates."

EVEN a pupil who is weak at maths can excel at working out how much to save for a holiday, South says.

Better yet, it might help them with maths, Stuart says.

"If you engage kids in something that actually matters in their world, which money does, then that is a new way of teaching."

Back at the Massey personal finance education centre, Wood has co-opted two lead researchers to figure out what school-leavers already know.

Researchers will interview 300 18-20 years olds, selected at random from different areas and ethnicities, every five years for the next 20 years in the first New Zealand longitudinal study of its kind.

The idea is to reveal the crisis point when adults tend to wish they knew more about money, prompting improvements to future teaching, Wood says.

"Hopefully we will also be able to shed some light on how their knowledge affects their behaviour. And what actually triggers the need for financial literacy," she says.

The centre is also developing a teaching qualification.

"There is no point us promoting that we need everybody to be financially literate if we don't really have quality educators," Wood says.

"We want to increase the capability of the whole sector."

Meanwhile, the Education Review Office has proposed leading a think tank with the New Zealand Qualifications Authority and the commission to monitor the teaching and assessment of financial education in schools.

More visibly, the nation's 15-year-olds are about to bare their financial knowledge to the OECD. New Zealand has agreed to take part in this year's OECD Programme for International Student Assessment (PISA) which includes a financial education component.

New Zealand students will be assessed in August and September on set tasks in financial literacy, enabling the ministry to compare our teens to pupils in about 20 other countries.

The results might be of interest to parents as well as schools.

"If you sit down with a group of parents and say `by the time your child leaves our school what is it you want them to be able to do?' they never ever talk about times tables," Stuart says.

"They talk about being able to work with others and ... all those essential life skills."

Financial literacy "is about learning in real life contexts and teaching kids that sometimes it is better to wait and get what you really want."

Even if that means missing out on the sleepover.

- © Fairfax NZ News