Ask a teenager to explain how interest works on a savings account or credit card. Ask them why prices rise during shortages, or how to budget for something they want. Most can’t answer confidently. Not because they aren’t smart, but because they’ve never been properly taught.
Financial education remains patchy in British schools. Understanding how choices, markets, and trade shape our world is rarely taught before age 14.
This creates adults who:
The gap in financial and economic education is a practical problem that affects every decision people make throughout their lives.
Millbrook transforms abstract concepts into concrete experiences. When characters manage pocket money, they're learning to budget. When they discover that choosing one thing means giving up another, they're grasping opportunity cost. When they save for something special and watch their money grow, they're understanding interest. Every story weaves practical money skills together with the economic thinking that makes those skills make sense, all through adventures children can't put down.
Every book comes with discussion points and quick activities that help children connect what they've read to their own lives. A conversation about a character's choices naturally leads to talking about the child's own decisions. A simple activity tracking spending or setting a savings goal turns a story into something they actively engage with. These are all part of how the learning sticks. Parents and teachers get practical ways to extend the conversation without it ever feeling like a lesson.
Economics doesn't have to mean supply curves and textbook definitions. We teach the same concepts through relatable situations such as a budget that won't stretch far enough, a market stall where prices change with shortages, a choice between two good options when you can only pick one.
Children understand these ideas because they experience them.
Children don't know they're learning economics. Our story-first learning approach embeds economic and financial literacy naturally into stories that capture imagination and hold attention.
Concepts emerge through character choices, dialogue, and plot, and are reinforced through structured activities that link to children’s everyday lives.
Our books address the UK National Curriculum requirements on financial literacy and go beyond this to utilise international best practice on the teaching of economic and financial literacy. Concepts progress developmentally within the books and over the series.
Teachers and parents are equipped with discussion points to probe comprehension, and activities to embed understanding.
Every concept connects to children's lived experience. We start with situations that already feel familiar, the kinds of choices and trade-offs children encounter in their own lives.
Understanding grows from there, built on a foundation they recognise. Because children can see themselves in the stories, what they learn stays with them long after they've finished reading.
David taught economics, maths, and ran the politics department at a London secondary school before leading a think tank focused on promoting economic literacy. Through research into the UK national curriculum, one thing became clear: children leave school without understanding the financial and economic basics that shape everyday life. His work focussed on understanding this context, and proposing policies to address it.
That's where Millbrook began.
Curriculum reform is moving slowly in the right direction, and Millbrook serves to support efforts to embed financial and economic literacy. Millbrook puts money skills and economic thinking into stories that children actually want to read.
The goal is simple: give children a head start on understanding how the world works, before anyone tells them economics is difficult.
