Every day so far this week, students have been asking me to explain what a ‘hung’ parliament is, while trying to hold back fits of giggles.

This has been annoying because, even though I like puns, hearing the same one in every class (sometimes more than once) is just too much. It’s also irritating because by the time I finally worked how to actually answer the question, it was all over and we ended up with a coalition.

As we saw last week, most of the parties had fairly similar plans regarding education but the thing the Conservatives and Lib Dems seem to have reached an instant agreement on is Pupil Premiums and how to fund them.

Although it looks like the money will be coming from child trust funds, I’ll be interested to see how they actually implement the cuts and whether they are across the board or they keep the trust funds for low-income family.

It’ll be a shame to lose child trust funds but I don’t think they would have ever lived up to the expectations some journalists laid out of these funds helping to encourage and glamorise saving money. As a teacher (although certainly not a particularly financially-savvy one) I cant help but think that actually teaching personal financial management in school would me more effective.

Now that almost all university students in the country will end up in debt, preparing them for it while they are still at school and teaching them how to manage it could be a far more valuable investment than a child trust fund.

This entry was posted on Thursday, May 13th, 2010 at 4:41 am and is filed under Government. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.