The classroom pack
Every page on this site was written to pass one test: would a head of economics be comfortable putting it in front of a class? Sourced claims, primary documents, real prices, no products, no politics, no preaching, and free debt help signposted wherever debt appears. This page maps the whole site onto the curriculum, gives you three lessons you could teach tomorrow, and tells you exactly what we will never do to your pupils.
Free, no accounts, no logins, nothing collected from pupils. Around thirty pages covering money creation, inflation, credit, APR, debt traps and mortgages, each with sources you can open and check. Every page prints as a handout. Nothing is sold and no product is ever recommended.
What changes in 2028, and why that matters now
On 4 November 2025 the government published its modernised curriculum for England. Citizenship becomes compulsory at primary level and includes financial literacy, on the stated reasoning that "children are now consumers often before they reach secondary school". The new curriculum is to be implemented in full for first teaching from September 2028.
Secondary teachers will notice something about that announcement: at Key Stages 3 and 4 in England, financial education has been in the citizenship national curriculum since 2014 already. The gap has never really been the wording. It has been time, confidence, and materials that a non-specialist can pick up cold.
There is also a structural reason coverage is patchy, and it is worth saying plainly because teachers already know it: academies, in the government's own words, "do not have to follow the national curriculum". A requirement that many schools are not bound by produces exactly the uneven picture everyone complains about.
None of which changes what a teacher needs on a Tuesday morning. So here is the mapping.
Curriculum mapping: England, citizenship
The national curriculum wording is quoted exactly. The pages listed are the ones that teach it.
Functions and uses of money: What is money, actually? · How do banks create money? · The history of money in 10 moments
Budgeting: The do and don't list
Managing risk: Money mules, a safeguarding topic as much as a finance one · What is credit? · Insurance: what are you actually buying? · Store cards · What is inflation?
Income and expenditure: Student loans: is it really a debt? works as a debate lesson on whether a thing called a debt that behaves like a tax should be taught as either · The do and don't list · Your first payslip, which works a real payslip line by line and doubles as a percentages exercise · Side hustle tax, which uses HMRC's own badges of trade as a classification exercise and separates a reporting rule from a tax rule
Credit and debt: What is credit? · Buy now, pay later, which pairs a change in the law from July 2026 with a lesson in how a price stops feeling like a price · Credit scores · What is APR? · Minimum payment calculator, which turns compound interest into something a class can argue with rather than memorise · Overdrafts, a single clean rate that every big bank landed on at once, which is a competition lesson as much as a money one · Crazy APRs · Balance transfers
Insurance: Insurance: what are you actually buying? covers the premium, the excess, why young drivers are priced the way they are, and fronting as a worked example of a false declaration · Your first car adds the whole bill up and works as a budgeting exercise with real published prices
Savings and pensions: Who actually owns the banks? traces a pupil's future workplace pension all the way to the companies it ends up owning · Currency debasement for why saving alone is not enough
Financial products and services: Renting your first flat, which covers deposits, banned fees and joint liability · Mortgages · Renting versus buying · The deposit · Store cards · Balance transfers
How public money is raised and spent: Why can't we just print more money? · Where money hides · Jekyll Island
Outside England: Scotland, Wales and Northern Ireland run their own curricula, and the mapping above will not match them line for line. The content will: money, credit, debt and risk are the same subject in Aberdeen as in Exeter, and every page stands alone.
Maths departments: the payslip checker is a live percentages exercise: change one input and watch four dependent figures move · the APR and store card pages contain worked compound interest with the arithmetic shown, which makes them usable as real-world context for percentages and growth without any citizenship framing at all.
Three lessons you could teach tomorrow
Set page: How do banks create money?
Starter, 5 minutes. Ask the class: when a bank lends someone £10,000, where does that money come from? Take answers on the board. Almost every class says: from other people's savings. Leave the answers up.
Main, 25 minutes. Read the page together, projected. The key moment is the Bank of England's own 2014 bulletin saying banks do not simply lend out savers' deposits. Have a pupil find that document and read the sentence aloud from the Bank's own website. The point is not to be told; it is to check.
Discussion, 15 minutes. Return to the board. Why did nearly everyone believe the wrong thing? Who taught us that? What else might we believe for the same reason?
Exit ticket, 5 minutes. One sentence: what happens to the money when the loan is repaid?
Set pages: Store cards and What is APR?
Starter, 5 minutes. "Ten percent off today if you open an account." Hands up: who takes it? Do not comment yet.
Main, 25 minutes. Work the arithmetic as a class. A discount now, an APR later, a minimum payment that barely moves the balance. The site shows its working so pupils can reproduce every figure in a spreadsheet. Let them get a different answer and argue about it; that is the lesson.
Discussion, 15 minutes. Who designed the offer? What do they know that the customer does not? Is the offer dishonest, or simply priced? That distinction is worth a whole lesson on its own.
Homework. Find a real offer, in a real shop or app, and work out its real cost. Bring the numbers.
Set page: Jekyll Island: the secret meeting that wrote the Federal Reserve
Starter, 5 minutes. Six men, a private railway carriage, false names and a duck-shooting cover story, in 1910. Ask: is this a conspiracy theory? Take a vote before reading.
Main, 25 minutes. Read it, then send pupils to the Federal Reserve's own history website to verify the dates, the names and the ruse. The exercise is source evaluation: a striking story that turns out to be documented by the institution it is about.
Discussion, 15 minutes. The page has a section headed "What this does and does not prove". Use it directly. Where do the documents stop? What would you need to see before believing more? Re-run the opening vote and ask who changed their mind and why.
Why this one works: it teaches the difference between evidence and inference on a topic pupils already have opinions about, which is far harder and far more useful than teaching it on a topic they do not care about.
Printing and projecting
Every page on this site is set up to print as a handout. Use your browser's normal print command and the navigation, adverts and decoration drop away, leaving black text on white with the diagrams intact and web addresses printed after links so pupils can find the sources on paper. No login, no download, no PDF to chase.
The diagrams are drawn as vectors, so they stay sharp on a projector at any size and on a photocopy. Pages are written to be read aloud: short sentences, one idea at a time, plain answers first.
No accounts, no logins, no data collection. A pupil can read every page without giving anything at all. We do not know who they are and we do not want to.
No products, ever. Nothing on this site recommends any card, loan, account, app or investment. No affiliate links to credit products. No bank sponsorship. That is a permanent commitment, printed in the footer of every page.
Advertising, stated plainly. Ordinary advertising pays for the site on the article pages. This page carries none. Across the whole site, ad personalisation is switched off on every request, because the readers are teenagers: every slot is tagged for teen treatment, which under the advertising rules disables personalisation and restricts categories such as gambling, alcohol and dating. Payday lending, debt management selling, get-rich-quick schemes and crypto promotion are blocked outright. The full policy is on the privacy page.
No shame. Debt pages are written on the principle that the traps are engineered and falling into one is not a character flaw. Where debt is discussed, free charity-run help is signposted. Some pupils in your room are living in a household in arrears; the pages are written knowing that.
No politics and no preaching. We explain machinery and ask questions. We do not tell anyone what to conclude, what to buy, or how to vote.
Where our facts come from
The spine of the site is two documents: the Bank of England's Quarterly Bulletin of 2014 Q1, Money creation in the modern economy, and Professor Richard Werner's peer-reviewed 2014 paper in the International Review of Financial Analysis, which tested the question empirically. Around those sit official statistics, central banks' own history pages, government publications and lenders' own published prices.
Every page carries a "Check it yourself" box listing its sources, and a "Last checked" date. Current figures are verified on the day a page is written and the date is printed beside them. Our method and our red lines, including everything we refuse to publish, are set out openly on the receipts page. If you find an error, tell us with the document and we will fix the page and update its date. Corrections from teachers get fixed fastest of all.
Questions teachers ask
Is it really free, and is there a catch?
Free, permanently, with no accounts and nothing to buy. The site is funded by ordinary advertising on its article pages, which is stated openly on the privacy page along with the categories we block. This teachers page carries no advertising at all.
Is the content safe for a mixed-ability Year 9 class?
It is written for roughly ages 13 to 17, in short sentences with a plain answer at the top of every page before any detail. Weaker readers can take the answer box and the checklist; stronger ones can follow the sources and argue with them. The do and don't list works as a one-screen version of the whole practical half of the site.
Can I copy pages into my own worksheets?
Yes. Print, project, quote and adapt for classroom use with credit to the site. If you want something bigger, such as a scheme of work or a translation, get in touch through the privacy page; the answer will usually be yes.
Does the site give financial advice?
No, and it never will. It explains how the machinery works, shows the sources and asks questions. It recommends no products and tells nobody what to do with their money. For decisions about real money, especially large ones, it is preparation, not advice.
Some of this is quite challenging. Is that deliberate?
Yes. Pupils are sold credit as adults from around eighteen, sometimes earlier through buy now pay later. A version of this subject that avoids the difficult parts is a version that leaves them unprepared. The site's rule is that anything hard gets explained rather than skipped.
Who wrote this and who funds it?
The site is written and run independently and anonymously in the UK, with no employer, sponsor or institution behind it, and no bank money of any kind. That is deliberate: a named author asks you to trust a person, and this site asks you to check a document instead. The full explanation is on the about page.
Read next
- The siteStart here: the whole site in 5 minutes
- The siteReceipts: our method and our red lines
- The siteGlossary: every term, in plain words
Last checked 25 August 2026.