High street banks could teach with branded materials in schools Christine Blower, general secretary of the National Union of Teachers, said: "Children and young people should not be exposed at an impressionable age to companies seeking to gain a foothold in their school." The idea also comes less than a month after consumer group Which? said its survey of branch and call centre staff at HSBC, RBS, Lloyds, Barclays and Santander indicated that many workers were still being driven towards putting "sales before service." This was despite previous major mis-selling scandals in which banks were found to be pressurising their staff into pushing products that may be unsuitable for the consumer. Some banks have already been providing teaching materials to schools on a more informal basis and deny it is a commercial exercise. Staff from RBS and Natwest have also given lessons in about 1,200 secondary schools over the past 18 years as part of their MoneySense for Schools programme. The Department for Education said that corporate involvement in teaching was not prohibited and brand names were allowed to be displayed on teaching materials. Tracey Bleakley, chief executive of the Personal Finance Education Group, a leading financial education charity, said young people were getting into increasingly complicated financial situations and any mistakes they made were likely to have repercussions. We have to help children get into good habits at school, encourage the concept of saving, and everyone - parents, teachers, politicians, the financial industry - seems to back that. Last month a study by by the Centre for Economics and Business Research found that a lack of financial education costs Britain £3.4bn a year. It claimed that financial education could reduce the risks of unemployment by 10% and that better education could help reduce the unemployment subsidy by £600m. Martin Lewis, a money-saving expert and financial education campaigner, has argued that children should be taught how to ask questions about how they spend, save and invest their money, because the world has changed. Whereas banks were previously there to "look after you," they are now there to "sell to you" and people need to understand what they are trying to do, he has argued. Without training, people will be kept ignorant of these matters, he says.