How Three Spires Trust approached financial education across its schools

Case study · Three Spires Trust · 7th November 2026

Three Spires Trust worked with Build & Conquer to give its schools a clear way to teach financial education across primary and secondary. The work focused on three practical questions. What should pupils learn at each stage? Where does it fit into the school day? And what do teachers need to feel confident teaching it?

Giving schools a shared starting point

For a trust working across age groups, one of the challenges is making sure that what pupils learn about money in primary school gives them something to build on in secondary school.

Build & Conquer supported the trust with a curriculum that revisits five themes as pupils get older: money awareness, budgeting, credit and risk, wealth creation, and ethics. A pupil might start by thinking about what they need and what they want. Later, they might weigh up the cost of borrowing or consider how an online offer is designed to influence what they buy. The decisions become more complex, but pupils can draw on ideas they’ve met before.

Helping teachers plan and teach the lessons

The curriculum gave staff a sequence to work from, alongside ready-to-use lessons and teacher guidance. The resources set out the vocabulary pupils need and include ways to make the tasks accessible, such as visual prompts and breaking a decision into smaller steps.

Professional development is part of that approach. It gives staff time to explore the subject, work through the resources and consider where financial education fits in their existing curriculum. The brochure describes the focus at this stage as helping educators “begin planning how the programme will be implemented within their own setting.”

Making room for pupils to explain their thinking

The curriculum describes one feature of every lesson as “purposeful oracy and structured discussion.” In practice, that means giving pupils time to say what they’d do, explain why and listen to someone who might make a different choice.

Take a budgeting task. A pupil decides how to spend a fixed amount, then learns that one of their essential costs has gone up. The teacher can ask, “What would you change in your plan, and why?” The answer gives the teacher something concrete to listen for. Did the pupil notice what they needed to pay for first? Could they explain what they’d give up or put off?

Looking at what changes over time

The programme sets out three areas for review: teacher confidence, curriculum implementation and pupil outcomes. For a trust, each tells a different part of the story. Staff can talk about how confident they feel leading a discussion about money. Leaders can look at where teaching is taking place and how it builds across year groups. Pupils’ work and classroom conversations can show how they reason through a decision.

For the next draft, I’d add one short quote from a trust leader about what prompted the work and one from a teacher about something they noticed in a lesson. The brochure provides the programme detail and the two quotations above. The budgeting task is illustrative, and the brochure doesn’t report trust-specific outcomes.