Eoghan Murphy (Dublin South East, Fine Gael)
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184. To ask the Minister for Education and Skills her plans to extend the curriculum in secondary schools to financial education and financial risk management (details supplied); and if she will make a statement on the matter. [40658/14]

Jan O'Sullivan (Limerick City, Labour)
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The management of personal finance is an important life skill which must be practised by everyone, young and old. To enable students to understand financial management skills as they apply to households and businesses both the current Junior Certificate Business Studies and Leaving Certificate business syllabuses include learning outcomes that focus on budgeting and financial management. While these subjects are optional on the curriculum the level of take up of the subjects is high. Also of relevance are the Transition Year business programmes developed by schools. Given the recent ongoing review of syllabuses, in particular the Business Studies syllabus, work is ongoing on strengthening existing curricular approaches to financial literacy development.

A number of organisations are working towards supporting the development of financial literacy and nearly all of the resources they develop are free to schools and are widely used. Quite often links exist between individual schools and organisations in the community including for example, banks, credit unions and the Money Advice and Budgetary Service (MABS), and these links provide the basis for the use of relevant resources.