Raising Financially Capable Kids. From Pocket Money To Portfolio

0 - 18 Roadmap - A free guide breaking down the what and when. What to teach your child about money and when to do it broken down by age. (PDF delivered via e-mail)

The MSK Runway - The how and why. Each Runway guide covers a specific age range. They include building long term money habits, conversations, scripts, and real activities you can use at home from day one. It's broken down into 12 waypoints (or units) to complete over a 3 year period. It's designed for busy parents to take their time with, to use in everyday life and to ensure the learning is embedded naturally, not as a lesson on an app or a worksheet at a desk. Alongside the education side (Track 1), every guide connects directly to Track 2: the JISA. You're not just getting a workbook — you're getting a system that runs both tracks simultaneously, all the way to 18. (PDF delivered via email)

I'm a full-time teacher with two boys, so I built this to fit around a real family, not around a spare hour I don't have.

Here's exactly how it works. Each Waypoint covers three months and has three pages: the information (what's going on and why), the resources (what you'll actually use), and the plan (how to spread it across those three months). Some Waypoints come with extra materials — a story to read together, a TV advert to watch and pull apart, that kind of thing.

You'll need 10–15 minutes to read through a Waypoint and feel comfortable with it. After that, it's built into things you're already doing — not extra lessons bolted onto your week.

Right now, at home, my 3-year-old is on his Waypoint building shops in the lounge and selling everything he can get his hands on. My 6-year-old has a "wishes folder" on my phone — he photographs things he wants in shops, and we use it to talk about wants versus needs and how to delay a purchase. A friend trialling the teenage version has her daughter running a lemonade stand over the holidays, trying to turn £50 into more. None of that is a lesson. It's just what's already happening at home, with a bit of direction.

Track 2, the JISA, is even lighter than that. Set it up once — you may well already have this — put a direct debit on it, and it runs quietly in the background for years without you touching it again.

As your child gets older, the guides shift from you leading to them thinking — from a wishes folder at 6, to running an actual small business at 16.

It's a proper, considered, step-by-step system. But it's built to live in real family life — at the shop, at the dinner table, in the moment — not in hours of dedicated teaching time.

That's exactly who I built this for. I'm a primary school teacher and a dad, not a financial adviser. I made mistakes — I didn't open a JISA when my son was born. I didn't have a clue where to start with investing. I built MSK because the clear, step-by-step guide I needed didn't exist. You don't need to know what a JISA is, what a global index fund is, or how compound interest works before you start. You just need to be willing to learn alongside your child. The guides do the explaining. In many ways if your child sees you learning with them it can re-enforce the learning and help you both build a life long connection with financial wellbeing.

A Junior ISA (JISA) is a tax-free investment account in your child's name. Up to £9,000 per tax year can go in, it grows tax-free, and your child can access it at 18. It's Track 2 — the investment side of the MSK system — and setting one up is genuinely one of the most powerful things a parent can do early.

That said — yes, you can absolutely use this without one. The education track (Track 1) stands completely on its own. The jars system, the conversations, the habits, the age-by-age curriculum — none of that requires a JISA.

Honestly? Because I built it as a parent who needed it, not as a bank trying to sell you a product or a guru selling you a course. I'm a primary school teacher. I know how children learn and I have a passion for teaching this stuff. I've also learnt later in life how to be money savvy myself. I've now been a buy-to-let landlord for a decade and have a personal interest in investing and wealth building. However, it's taken time; I've learned the hard way and made mistakes along the way. MSK is the resource I never had growing up, and the one I'm using with my own boys right now.

The Runway is structured, age-by-age, and runs two tracks side by side from birth to 18. There's nothing else out there doing this in the same way. A lot of parents with JISAs worry what their child will do with their money when they get to 18. This is designed to solve that problem. Most children arrive at 18 with either a pot or an education. Very few arrive with both.

Financial education in UK schools has improved — genuinely. Wales and Scotland have embedded it further into their curricula, and England has been moving in the same direction. But the national data tells a more complicated story than "sorted."

The Money and Pensions Service's Financial Foundations survey — a nationally representative study of 4,740 UK children aged 7–17 — found that only 47% had received what it defines as a "meaningful financial education," barely moved from 48% three years earlier (MaPS, UK Children and Young People's Financial Wellbeing Survey: Financial Foundations, 2023). Dig into where that comes from and the picture gets clearer: a third (33%) of children recalled learning about money in school and finding it useful, and nearly a quarter (24%) had received key elements of financial education at home. Only 10% had both (MaPS, 2023). Home and school are each doing part of the job — almost never the same child gets both.

And that combination matters. MaPS found that children who receive financial education from both home and school show the highest levels of confidence, the most regular saving, and the strongest day-to-day money management — stronger than either source alone (MaPS, 2023). That's the finding I built MSK around: it isn't school or home. It's both, running together.

The home side has its own gap. Just over half of parents say they feel confident talking to their children about money — which means close to half don't (MaPS, 2023). It's not that parents don't care. Most do. They just weren't given a system.

The investment side tells a similar story. Only 14–15% of eligible UK children had an active Junior ISA in 2023/24 (HMRC, Annual Savings Statistics, 2024) — meaning the large majority of children reach adulthood with no tax-free pot waiting for them at all. And even among families who do open one, follow-through is patchy: almost one million Junior ISAs received no contributions at all in 2023–24, despite rising numbers of accounts being opened (Nottingham Building Society analysis of HMRC data, 2025).

So here's the shape of it. Schools are doing more than they used to, but coverage is inconsistent and reaches under half of children meaningfully. Just over half of parents feel confident having the conversation at home. And fewer than one in six children has a JISA quietly working in the background. Three different gaps, all pointing the same way — toward a joined-up approach that doesn't yet exist for most families.

That's what the MSK Runway is: the two tracks — education and investment — running together, deliberately, from birth to 18. Not instead of what schools do. Alongside it, and beyond it, at home.