Mandating too late: the primary school gap in Europe’s financial literacy landscape

The European Commission’s Savings and Investments Union is the most ambitious step toward European capital market integration in a generation, but its success depends on whether citizens have the financial literacy to participate – and the signs are not encouraging. According to the EC Flash Eurobarometer 525, only 18% of EU citizens are highly financially literate, while most struggle with basic questions about interest, inflation and risk. Closing that gap requires structural reform, and the stronger level is school education, but only if it starts early enough. Because the financial habits that shape adult behaviour form by age seven (Whitebread & Bingham, 2013), reform has to reach children in primary school, not in secondary classrooms, which is where most Member States begin.

A fragmented landscape

When should financial education start? Across the EU-27, the answer is revealing. Only two Member States have a statutory obligation that reaches primary school — Italy and Portugal — and Portugal’s is only partial and cycle-discretionary. A further nine have some formal primary content, but it is largely transversal, concentrated in upper years or subsidy-driven rather than required from the start. Around fifteen offer only voluntary provision. Greece has none at the primary level. Where mandates exist, they overwhelmingly begin at the lower secondary level (ages 12-14), after the window for shaping habits has closed.

The case for early intervention

The first argument is behavioural: by age seven, a child has settled how they handle money — whether they save or spend, plan or not. A curriculum that begins in secondary school works against patterns already formed rather than helping to shape them.

The second is about competency. Mathematical proficiency and financial capability are distinct. Numeracy leaves untouched the behavioural biases that drive poor financial decisions (Amagir et al., 2018), like choosing smaller immediate rewards over larger future ones. PISA 2022 makes the gap visible. Even after years of mathematics instruction, nearly one in five 15-year-old participants failed to reach baseline proficiency in financial literacy (OECD, 2024).

Children are not passive bystanders in digital finance. Gaming platforms, social media and allowance apps embed real transactions — virtual currencies, microtransactions, gamified investment tools — in children’s daily lives, yet most are built for adults. A 2026 UNICEF Innocenti review found that where a child is shielded at all, the protection usually comes from data-privacy or platform rules, not from financial regulation. In every jurisdiction the review examined, the safeguards that would matter most — a minimum age to open an account, limits on features that nudge spending — did not exist. Where the law offers no shield, education must carry the weight.

Designing a curricular floor

A common European floor cannot mean a common curriculum.[1] What matters is not uniformity but that no child reaches secondary school without financial education. Too often it is postponed until then or dispersed so broadly that no one is accountable. The cost is not abstract. It is the adult who never learned to budget, takes on debt blindly or never saves for retirement.

The real risk for Europe is not that financial literacy is absent from schools, but that it arrives too late to make the difference policymakers hope for.

References

• Amagir, A., Groot, W., Maassen van den Brink, H. & Wilschut, A. (2018). A review of financial-literacy education programs for children and adolescents. Educational Research Review, 25, 1–24.
• EBF. (2025). EBF shares recommendations for a stronger European financial literacy strategy. https://www.ebf.eu
• EC Flash Eurobarometer 525. (2023). Financial literacy in the European Union. European Commission.
• OECD. (2024). PISA 2022 Results (Volume IV): How Financially Smart Are Students? OECD Publishing. https://doi.org/10.1787/5a849c2a-en
• UNICEF Innocenti. (2026). Landscape Report on Financial Technologies and Children. UNICEF Office of Strategy and Evidence – Innocenti, Florence.
• Whitebread, D. & Bingham, S. (2013). Habit Formation and Learning in Young Children. Money Advice Service.

[1] Under Article 165 TFEU, education remains a national competence. The EU can support and coordinate but cannot prescribe curricula in Member States. Any shared standard must therefore rely on coordination rather than legislation.