Financial education still at a standstill in Italian schools

In Europe, there is no doubt: early and continuous exposure to financial education results in measurable improvements in financial behaviour and knowledge. Member States where financial education is incorporated into the education pathway defined at national level consistently rank among the best in terms of financial literacy in EU-wide surveys. And where do we stand in Italy? Capital Law (Law 21 of 2024) introduced a significant innovation in the area of financial education, recognising it as an integral part of the teaching of civic education in Italian schools.

In fact, the topic had already begun to be discussed in the summer of 2023, so much so that the Committee for Financial Education had given the guidelines for schools even before the approval of the Capital Law, which in turn converted a 2023 law in 2024. As far as Plus24 understands, however, financial education in schools is currently still at the pole. The law in fact stipulates that the Ministry of Education and Merit shall determine the content of the teaching of Financial Education in agreement with the Bank of Italy, Consob and Ivass. Operational guidelines are now awaited for teachers, who will have to follow dedicated training programmes. At the moment, however, the cooperation agreement between the ministry and the various authorities is lacking.

Financial education, therefore, was not established as a subject in its own right, but constitutes a topic on which schools have the opportunity to develop initiatives. It is part of many topics that can be covered in civic education as a whole. Antonello Giannelli, president of the National Association of Head Teachers, recalls: 'Civic education is a kind of container that includes everything and more. Because of the wide range of topics included in this container, not all schools are able to cover all topics'. In the past, the problem of a 'short blanket' had already been raised, i.e. the difficulty regarding the resources or time available to deal with all the content that would fall under civic education: 'Currently this subject,' according to Giannelli, 'has only one hour a week available, and it is difficult to make significant changes. Therefore, the decision on which topics to focus on most is up to the individual school's planning, as an autonomous institution. "In general," Giannelli continues, "there does not seem to have been a clear expansion in the number of schools dealing with financial education. Those that already had a tradition of dealing with this topic tend to continue with their activities. Despite the expected inclusion in civic education, no particularly significant changes have been observed with respect to the implementation of this subject in the various schools'.

Obviously, schools with a greater sensitivity to the subject, such as technical-economic institutes, certainly carry out financial education activities, but even these have many other initiatives to implement. And in the face of the many things to be done, schools have to divide themselves and look for appropriate opportunities to include this type of activity.

Updates from the OECD's Pisa (Programme for International Student Assessment) report are expected shortly. The last one is from 2022 and Italian 15-year-olds had scored 484 points in the indicators related to financial education and were below the OECD average (498). Italian students had scored similar to Norwegian and Spanish students, but lower than those of Belgium, Denmark, the Netherlands, the Czech Republic, Austria, Poland, Portugal and Hungary. As Bankitalia recalled, in a reconstruction of the Pisa report, the latter also examined the contribution of school: students were presented with 16 terms relating to the economic and financial world and had to indicate whether they had ever heard of or learned anything about it at school in the last twelve months. Italian students said on average that they had learnt at school and knew the meaning of 6 out of 16 terms, one term less than the OECD average.