Personal Finance

Resource Pack

This learning phase is separated into two parts. The first looks at creating a household budget and the second focuses in on Grocery shopping to a budget, which will require computer access, but could also be set as a homework task.

I put this together as part of a year 12 carousel program where the students spend 1 lesson with a teacher looking at a specific topic and then move on to a new teacher an topic. However, this could be used with Key Stage 4 or Key Stage 5.

The purpose of the first sessions is:

To give you an idea of the cost of living in the UK.
To look at different types of expenditure that need to be consider in a household budget.
To understand different types of deductions and how taxation works.
To put together a fictional budget for a household.

The purpose of the second session is:

To think about the essentials and necessary items that a household needs to buy each month.
To consider the cost of these items.
To see if you can get everything you need with the budget you have set yourself.

The way I see the lesson going is that the students are randomly allocated a family situation and a job. They then use the information on these cards and the budget guidelines to work out a household budget. This includes working out what their tax would be, any student loan repayments and bills etc.

The second lesson where they are focusing on the groceries is to give an idea of the cost of living. The first thing they need to do is work out what they think is an essential, a necessity and then the luxuries they would like to have, but again they have to think about their whole family unit not just themselves.

With this information they then go online to one of the listed supermarkets (their choice of which one) to see if they can buy all they need on the budget they have determined in the first part of the session.

I have tried to make it as realistic as possible so prices and guidelines are based on 2019 prices.