Money skills lesson two: Value for money

A key step in cementing good money habits for your student’s future is helping them gain a better understanding of value for money and how to budget and plan for the future. The activities on this page allow students to develop these skills in a variety of ways, whether you’re looking for short activities or something more in-depth:

Teaching resources:

• Value for money: Lesson plan and presentation slides –full lesson plan for use with a group of students in the classroom
• Money role models and pressures: Video transcripts – you can use these transcripts if you are unable to view the videos within the lesson plan
• Saving money and budgeting: Interactive worksheet – activity for independent learning whether remote or in class

Lesson plan

(60 to 90 minutes)

This lesson is designed to help students understand how to budget and plan for the future, and encourage them to consider value for money. This is lesson two of four focusing on Money Skills for young people aged 11-14.

Lesson learning outcomes

By the end of the lesson students will be able to:

• Understand the difference between income and expenditure
• Complete and critique a sample personal budget

To ensure that the lesson plan and student-facing interactive PDF work together smoothly, please make sure you download and save the lesson plan and presentation slides into the same folder on your computer.

Interactive worksheet

(15 to 20 minutes)

Please note that students below the age of 14 cannot sign up for their own LifeSkills account. Any independent tasks must be printed or downloaded and provided digitally for them to complete as they are currently hosted on educator pages.

Students can use the Saving money and budgeting interactive worksheet to understand how to create a budget that tracks their own incomings and outgoings and identify their spending and saving habits.

The worksheet contains some of the themes from the full lesson and can be printed or completed digitally. You may like to assign this activity:

• As homework following the Value for money lesson
• For independent study
• For remote learning

Further support for developing students’ money skills

There are three more Money skills lessons for this age group that complement the learning here by helping students recognise their money personality, taking the next steps in their financial journey  and learning about fraud and dealing with financial dilemmas.

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.

Enhance your students' knowledge of the topic further by heading to BBC Teach and watching film case studies of young people’s experience of budgeting, saving, debt and understanding credit.

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.