Children should be taught more about personal finance at school, according to a Norfolk MP who said he was never educated about mortgages, savings or pensions in lessons.
Broadland Conservative MP Jerome Mayhew led a parliamentary debate in which he called for better financial education in schools, to help stop people getting into difficulties later in life.
Mr Mayhew, who went to Tonbridge School, a leading boarding school in Kent, described his education as "defective".
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The MP, a former managing director of the Go Ape outdoor activities company, said: "I was given no education about investment or what an individual savings account was - I had no idea.
"I did not know what pensions were; I had heard of them, obviously, but I had never been instructed on how they work, how to apply for one, what the options are, whether I should have a workplace pension, what a final salary pension is, what a defined-contribution pension is or what the differences between them might be.
"I had no idea what mortgages were. I had heard of them, obviously, and I knew that people had them, but I did not know how to apply for them, the differences between an interest-only mortgage and a repayment mortgage, or what an endowment mortgage was."
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Mr Mayhew said his children had also not had any education about financial matters at school.
He said research showed people who received financial education as a child saved 44pc more into their pension pot than those who had not.
Mr Mayhew said: "That is a startling statistic, and it is not just pensions, but savings more generally. Of those who received financial education, more than 50pc had saved more than £5,000 for a rainy day; of those with no financial education, only a third had saved that much.
"There is a middle-class secret to financial education and those who receive such education at home get a huge leg-up throughout the rest of their lives.
"It is the job of state education, universally applied, to overcome the deficit and level up so that we can close the middle-class leg-up and bring everyone up to the same standard."
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