ECONOMIC AND FINANCIAL PLANNING IN SCHOOLS: REFLECTIONS AND PRACTICAL PROPOSALS

The Italian position on financial literacy was critical even before the COVID-19 emergency. The Pisa 2018 report (OECD-2020) indicated a high risk of 'financial illiteracy', showing how, among the G20 countries, Italy was in the second last place for financial skills. The latest Consob reports show as 80% of Italian citizens are unable to choose effective financial products matching their needs. The debate on intervention methods and their effectiveness is still ongoing and today, in particular, an effort to design and adapt actions to the current situation is required. It is important to remember that ‘quality education’, ‘decent work and economic growth’ are among the 17 Sustainable Development Goals of the United Nations General Assembly for the 2030 Agenda. In order to achieve these goals, it is also necessary to address economic and financial education interventions as early as to children and adolescents, since they are able to make economic decisions related to the goods available at their disposal and that helps them to become skilled citizens, active and aware agents as adults (Valle et al, 2020). To nowadays, in the Italian context, there is no curriculum dedicated to the development of economic and financial competences, but recently economic and financial issues have been included in the school Civic Education curriculum. This opens up the chance of projecting specific good practices: incorporating the study of economics into the curricula would enable teachers to systematically approach the subject and children to perceive and experience its relevance, as well as to understand the link between economic knowledge and other school subject areas. A useful modality is the so-called Learning Units, defined as interdisciplinary didactic pathways related to a specific topic that, through several methodologies, involve children and favor the acquisition and consolidation of notions. In the current scenario, the present paper seeks to use the Learning Units projecting as a methodology to include financial and educational intervention from a multi-disciplinary point of view (Marchetti et al., 2020). This methodology also favors the distance learning activated during the COVID-19 lockdowns allows the use of digital platforms where it is possible to create content tailored to the users and which can be transformed into webinars or public events, including recreational ones.