Martin Lewis, founder of MoneySavingExpert.com, has donated ￡325,000 to fund a personal finance textbook aimed at 15 and 16-year-olds which he said would make it “easier for teachers and schools to teach financial education”.

Every state secondary school in England will receive 100 free copies of the book, Your Money Matters, produced by financial education charity Young Money, with guidance from Mr Lewis.

The textbook covers topics including budgeting, student finance and knowing your consumer rights.

Although financial education has been on the national curriculum in England since 2014, a study by the all party parliamentary group on financial education found that only 17 per cent of secondary schoolteachers had received training or advice about how to teach it.

“Companies spend billions on advertising, marketing and teaching staff to sell, yet we don’t get any buyer’s training. That needs to change,” said Mr Lewis. “The best place to teach is in the classroom — I hope this textbook will help make that easier.

“I still wrestle with whether it’s right that a private individual should fund this. Yet nothing else was forthcoming, and pragmatics outweigh principles.”

Emphasising the importance of financial education for society, Michael Mercieca, chief executive of Young Money, said: “It’s vital to the personal wellbeing of individuals and to the country that we improve the education of young people in this area to give them the best possible chance of success in the future.”

A free PDF version of the book is available to download here.

Letter in response to this article:

A child as young as seven can learn about money / From Carol Knight, Chief Operations Officer, TISA, and others