Children and Money - do we do enough?

A friend of mine recently told me a story.  He has a young daughter and every now and again he plays "shop".  As well as being fun, the idea of playing this game was so that his daughter could understand more about how money works in the real world.  His daughter plays the shopkeeper, and my friend is the customer.  They use one of her toy bears as the "product" and set a price for what she might have paid for this toy bear.  Then she sells it to my friend.  The first time they played, she tried to sell it for less than she paid.  This gave my friend the opportunity to explain that she should be charging more.  The next time she picked a price of a million pounds (quite expensive for a teddy!)....but as they played more and she understood the nature of the game she started to pick prices which were reasonable but over the amount she had paid.

I played a similar game with my eldest daughter, Charlotte, when she was young and intend to do the same with Sophie when she's old enough.  We all know that Children learn significantly faster than adults and I'm a firm believer in equipping both my daughters with at least very basic money management skills to help them when they start to have to look after their own finances in the real world.  You could argue that children shouldn't worry about this sort of thing until they need to, however I'd disagree and make the point that like any skill if you start learning, understanding and developing earlier in life the easier it is.  I also believe that whilst parents can help to develop childrens understanding of money, the education system needs to be far better equipped to help with this.

PFEG (Personal finance education group) provide a great range of resources to educators to help teach financial capability and that is a huge step forward from  providing any form of financial education in schools.  However, I'd suggest that although we are making huge strides in helping our children prepare for the real world I believe we still have a way to go.  My belief is that teaching financial capability as a core part of the curriculum is the best way forward.  I'm proud of my B in GCSE in geography however it's not really been the most practical qualification in the world and surely any school, college or university leaver would  have find learning how to become more financially capable of far greater benefit to them both day to day and longer term.

Thankfully it does look like there is changes occurring, with an all parliamentary group on financial education recommending that it should be a compulsory part of the curriculum.  This has recently had support from the Prime Minister and will be considered as part of a current review of the schools syllabus.  How these changes will look in practice and whether they will go far enough remain to be seen, but any move towards a more structured approach has to be positive.  But as ever, I'm interested in your opinions....what do you believe is the best approach to teach Children about Money?  Should Schools take full responsibility, or should parents share this?  What else could we do to help our teachers, children and parents?