A culture where we buy now, pay later

While it is right that children and teenagers should not feel overly anxious about money, creating a sense of financial responsibility from a young age can help prepare them for adulthood and prevent them running into financial difficulty later in life. The consequences of a "buy now, pay later" culture in modern society is already taking its toll.

Half of young people in the UK say their friends put pressure on them to keep spending even when they have run out of money, and 80 per cent admit to not properly keeping track of their finances. Large sums are nowadays spent on marketing loans and overdraft services to young people, particularly students. Yet most teenagers receive little informal education to promote long-term financial choices.

The Financial Services Authority (FSA) helps to promote financial capability in schools as well as direct to young people, parents and workplaces. It does so through a combination of online support tools for teachers and professionals to be confident in teaching young people about finance, and a grants programme that supports the rollout of innovative projects to promote financial literacy. Since 2002, more than 500 secondary schools have benefited from support, via two million hits to the website and downloads of support tools.

Personal Finance Education Group (Pfeg), the charity that helps educate young people about financial capability, has joined forces with HSBC to deliver its What Money Means project to 17,500 primary schools nationwide. The project delivers free resources and materials and helps teachers to deliver a sound understanding of financial management in the classroom. Projects led by the charity use creative and imaginative techniques to develop children's sense of financial responsibility in a fun way. For example, a primary school in Hartlepool invited a local poet to explore money-orientated language with pupils, looking at concepts such as "needs" and "wants", and words such as "precious" and "valuable" in order to help children develop a sense of the value of luxuries and necessities rather than just their cost. This has boosted pupils' financial awareness and made them think more broadly about priorities at an early stage in life.

We can instil a sense of financial responsibility into young people without scaring them. There are creative ways to explore financial themes and engage young people on what might seem a distant concern. Through tackling it early, schools can play an important role in influencing their attitudes into adulthood regardless of their social background.

- Anne Longfield is chief executive of 4Children. Email anne.longfield@haymarket.com.