Earlier this year, a national survey of parents with kids between the ages of 8-17 years revealed that 43% of parents believe their children don’t learn enough about money at school.
To address this, the Federal Government invited the states and territories to participate in a new agreement that will support the expansion of the MoneySmart financial literacy program in schools for a further four years.
However, amid the push to improve the financial literacy of Australian students, some say young people lack sufficient knowledge about tax and superannuation.
While these aren’t exactly topics that generate excitement and inspiration, they do impact the finances, and lives, of every adult.
One issue is that while schools have been touching upon tax and super in business studies, it can often be difficult for educators to make it as engaging as subjects like STEM or music education.
According to Rebecca Seibert, a business teacher from Queensland’s Mareeba State High School, the age old textbook theory of business that is taught every year can be “rather boring and not necessarily current”.
“Teaching business to Students like any other subject is presented with comments such as; ‘business is boring and how does this relate to anything we are going to do when we leave school?’” Seibert said.
“As a business teacher I feel to be competitive in education and allow students transferrable skills into industry we need to grip on to any opportunities to align curriculum with real life openings that link directly with Government and industry.”
The Australian Taxation Office (ATO) recently launched the 2018 Tax, Super +You competition, which aims to encourage high school students to think outside the box and develop creative ideas on how they think tax and/or super contributes to the community.
Seibert, whose school participated in the competition, said the online learning was easy to use and allowed students to continue working from home.
“As a teacher monitoring the students work online is always a bonus and the website made this an easy task,” she said.
“You would think students in high school would know simple concepts such as tax and super but just like land line phones and area codes these simple concepts seems to have missed this generation.”
Seibert said the opportunity to provide current, relevant learning was not only a bonus for her as a teacher but she experienced “much delight” with the students displayed motivation and enthusiasm with learning about tax.
“I can’t wait to run it again with my new group of students this year,” she said.
Kyra McGuinness, a design and technologies teacher from Rossmoyne Senior High School, located in Queensland, said her school’s involvement saw students work together and independently as a group to develop their understanding of tax and super.
“They were self-motivated and drew upon their skills not only from my subject but from other learning areas across the school,” McGuinness said.
“I believed my students already had a basic understanding of Tax and Super, but in class we talked about the issues in society for the 'Baby boomer' generation and how and why many of them simply don't have enough Super put away for retirement.”