Calculating salaries, payslips, student loans and pensions

This lesson contains content from a lesson previously titled Money skills lesson two: Money and work.

The suite of LifeSkills money skills content has recently been updated. Responding to insights from teaching professionals and the benefits of building key topics over time we’ve made changes enabling clearer sequencing through the content. This will support your students to deepen their knowledge as they progress through education and help embed skills to support with financial independence.

To see an overview of the updates and where key topics can be found please visit Money Skills resource updates. The wider suite of Money Skills content has been developed to engage your pupils with a mix of resource types including interactive tools and films, aligns to the Young Money Financial Education Planning Framework and has been awarded the Young Money Quality Mark.

The Calculating salaries, payslips, student loans and pensions lesson encourages students to become familiar with reading a payslip and calculating pay, exploring loans and pensions, and identifying employee benefits beyond a salary.

Resources

• Calculating salaries, payslips, student loans and pensions: Lesson plan - for use with a group of students in the classroom.
• Why Salary isn’t Everything interactive tool - to use as part of one of the lesson activities (Internet access required).
• Calculating salaries, payslips, student loans and pensions: Presentation slides - to display to students and use alongside the lesson plan.

Lesson learning outcomes

By the end of the lesson students will have:

• Identified the main features of a payslip, and be able to explain some key terms.
• Calculated gross and net pay accounting for a range of deductions.
• Identified employee benefits beyond salary.

Enhance your students' knowledge of the topic further by heading to BBC Teach and watching films which cover topics such as budgeting, saving, debt and understanding credit.

Why not include financial capability as a focus in your students’ wider curriculum? Refer to our Content guide to find out how LifeSkills resources can be used in PSHE or Maths lessons.

If you want to increase your own confidence to teach young people about money, Young Money provide free e-learning training to teachers across Primary and Secondary education. In addition, National Numeracy has a free website which helps you practise and refresh your everyday maths skills.