Financial education: the tools are there, continuity is not

Italy does not need to invent financial education, because it has long had institutions engaged in public outreach, professional associations, teaching materials and people capable of explaining how money, credit and savings are managed; what it does need to ask is why this availability has still not become a sufficiently widespread and lasting form of preparation. The limitation cannot be traced only to the number of initiatives, often worthwhile, but to their ability to accompany people through the years when habits are formed and the first financial responsibilities are taken on. A single meeting can spark interest, a campaign can draw attention and a portal can offer answers, but building skills requires revisiting topics, applying them to different problems and checking that they are understood. Continuity is the step that turns a collection of occasions into an educational path, and it is precisely on this step that a discussion that is less celebratory and more demanding should focus.

Nor is the starting point one of absolute absence of progress: in the Bank of Italy’s survey of adults, the financial literacy indicator rose from 10.2 in 2020 to 10.7 in 2023, on a scale from zero to twenty, while still remaining at low levels. PISA 2022, referring to 15-year-olds, instead found that 18% of Italian students do not reach the basic level and that there is a 68-point gap between socioeconomically advantaged and disadvantaged students. These are different surveys, concerning different periods and populations, and they predate the new school guidelines: they therefore do not measure the effectiveness of their implementation and, on their own, do not show what the cause of the difficulties is. They do, however, show that having tools available is not enough to ensure adequate results, making it necessary to ask how they are used, by whom and with what regularity, rather than assuming that talking about finance more and more often is the same as understanding it better.

In the programmes from 2024, but without a place of its own

It would be inaccurate to write that financial education is not included in the Italian school system: Law No. 21 of 2024 and the subsequent guidelines for civic education explicitly introduced these skills into the school curriculum, with objectives that in primary school already include the value of money and simple spending and saving plans. The limit of this approach is that the at least 33 annual hours provided for concern the whole teaching of civic education, in which numerous topics coexist, and do not amount to a dedicated allocation reserved for financial preparation. The formal inclusion is therefore a real step, and one that should not be erased in any account of the facts, but it leaves open the decisive question: how much actual time does each student receive, and what progression is guaranteed from one year to the next? Without a verifiable answer, the risk is that a nationally recognised goal remains tied to very different paths, difficult to compare and dependent on the organisation of each individual school.

The editorial thesis is clear: diluting financial education inside an already very broad container is a mistake if that arrangement prevents it from having continuity, recognisable responsibilities and its own assessment. Civic education and financial education are distinct subjects: the first concerns above all rights, duties, institutions and participation in collective life; the second must prepare people for concrete decisions about income, consumption, assets and the risks of personal and family life. The two dimensions are clearly connected, because individual economic choices also have social consequences and citizenship includes economic responsibilities, but that does not make them interchangeable or justify a residual approach to financial preparation. The proposal to give it a recognisable autonomy arises from this difference in subject matter and method, not from denying those links: reading a payslip, comparing the cost of a loan and planning an expense all require specific exercises and dedicated time.

Professional skills already exist

The request for stable teaching should not be met by putting everything off until the day we have trained a new category of specialists: Italy already has tens of thousands of financial advisers, independent and authorised for off-premises offering, as well as specialised educators and associations committed to spreading economic culture. AIEF alone says it has more than 1,900 members in its register of financial educators, while Anasf’s economic@mente project has been aimed at upper secondary school students since 2009. These figures and experiences do not mean that all professionals are automatically available, nor can they be added together without considering possible overlaps, but they do show that a concrete base already exists. Those who deal every day with planning, pensions, credit and the protection of savings can bring realistic examples and knowledge of recurring difficulties into classrooms, provided their contribution is part of a teaching project and does not remain an occasional appearance.

There is therefore no need to create every necessary skill from scratch; what is needed is to organise the skills already available through agreements between schools, universities, institutions and professionals, with transparent assignments, a timetable, resources and shared objectives. The ability to advise an adult does not automatically coincide with the ability to teach a child, so a teaching link remains necessary, especially in primary school, but adapting language and exercises is a manageable task, not a reason to postpone teaching. Schoolteachers are responsible for ensuring consistency with pupils’ educational path and for educational accountability; consultants and educators can be entrusted with a continuous specialist contribution, selecting those who have the skills and aptitude for training. It is also necessary to define how to pay for the work when needed and to ensure coverage in less served areas, because a national policy cannot depend solely on volunteering or on the presence of a professional available near a particular school.

An autonomous subject from primary school through adult choices

The proposal is to give financial education a specific place in the curriculum, with dedicated hours, an identifiable coordinator and progressive milestones, avoiding the need for it to compete every time with all the other educational urgencies. In primary school, teaching can begin with the value of money, the distinction between needs and wants and the time needed to reach a small goal; in lower secondary school, percentages, price comparisons, payment tools and digital purchases can be addressed; in upper secondary school, payslips, inflation, credit, pensions, insurance and risk must find their place. The aim is not to encourage children to invest or to introduce incomprehensible formulas too early, but to build a progression in which concepts return with increasing complexity and become usable. The subject’s autonomy should ensure this work, maintaining useful links with mathematics, law and technology without confusing integration between subjects with the disappearance of one of them.

Continuity should also continue through university and vocational training, with practical modules accessible to those who do not attend economics courses, because entering the labour market, renting a home or starting a business exposes people to decisions that no qualification makes automatically clear. It is equally important to keep offering training to adults: someone who today must choose a mortgage or assess insurance coverage cannot wait for the effects of a school reform. The mistake is not in organising these initiatives, but in assigning them the task of permanently replacing an initial preparation that is not guaranteed for everyone. The network outside the school must support and update, while the education system must build the foundations; achieving this is not just a matter of adding a name to the timetable, because without resources, teachers or experts actually appointed and without assessment of learning, even a new subject risks remaining a mere formality.

Discontinuity reproduces family differences

The importance of the school emerges with particular clarity from a Bank of Italy study published in 2024, which assessed its programme through two experiments involving more than 600 primary pupils and nearly 900 lower secondary students. In the samples examined, classroom training significantly improved financial skills, while self-study of the materials produced positive results only among students from families with socio-economic and cultural conditions above the median. The result does not show that any lesson will work or that self-study materials are useless, but it does indicate how much educational mediation can matter for those with fewer starting resources. Publishing a booklet or opening a portal therefore does not guarantee that everyone can derive the same benefit from it: the continuity of teaching is also a matter of equal opportunity, because it reduces dependence on parents’ financial preparation.

This reasoning does not, however, allow every family difficulty to be explained by a lack of financial culture: insufficient income, job loss or excessively high housing costs can prevent saving even for those who plan carefully. In the same way, it is not correct to attribute the higher propensity to save observed in certain societies automatically to school teaching, because welfare, demographics, income and family habits also matter. International experiences are useful when they show documented organisational choices: Japan strengthened financial content in upper secondary schools with the curriculum guidelines that came into force in 2022, while in Taiwan school and financial authorities have been working together since 2009 on educational programmes. The comparison serves to understand how to combine resources, teaching and updating, without turning entire populations into models of virtue or blaming Italians for some undifferentiated lack of goals.

Measuring learning instead of celebrating initiatives

The question of who benefits from a poorly prepared citizen deserves to be asked without invoking an organised project to preserve ignorance: a client who understands less may find it harder to compare costs, identify a conflict of interest or refuse an unsuitable proposal. For this reason, the involvement of professionals must be accompanied by independence of content, transparency about sponsors and a ban on turning lessons into commercial promotion or a way of collecting contacts from students and families. An effective course must also teach people not to buy, to ask how the adviser is paid and to recognise that a high return requires the risk to be examined. Greater client preparation, moreover, does not replace supervision, intermediary fairness and contract clarity: individual responsibility grows together with protections, not in their place, and cannot become an excuse to blame every loss on the person who suffered it.

The final assessment should concern how many classes actually follow the programme, how many hours they receive, what skills they acquire and how much they retain in later years, publishing results that make it possible to correct what does not work. A 2022 meta-analysis of 76 randomised experiments and more than 160,000 participants found positive average effects of financial education on knowledge and behaviour: there are therefore reasons to invest in well-designed programmes, without assuming that every initiative is effective simply because it addresses an important topic. The tools have been available for a long time and professional skills do not need to be invented; what is lacking is the guarantee that every student will encounter stable, recognisable and progressive teaching. Giving financial education its own space means taking on this responsibility, freeing it from the precariousness of occasional efforts: after years spent explaining its importance, the test to pass is to make it a normal part of preparation for life.