Year: 2025
Teacher: Mr Sam Kershler
School: Giant Steps, Melbourne
Giant Steps in Melbourne is a school for children on the autism spectrum. It has introduced several programs to provide job and social experiences tailored to its students’ specific needs and abilities, including activities that support them in interacting with their local community.
Last year, assistant principal Sam Kershler, developed a program to enable students to become more familiar with money and how it works.
“As our students grow older, we want to help prepare and teach them on how to look after themselves, including understanding money and budgeting,” Sam says.
The lessons were designed to help students develop their counting and financial literacy skills, such as identifying coins and notes, understanding the shopping process, and working out a budget.
At the start of the program, students used toy shop money to build their familiarity with currency and denominations. They then watched a video about going to the supermarket so they could build an understanding of what to expect on an excursion.
Sam says predictability is key to such activities. “Many of our students get a lot of enjoyment from going out into the community, but it can also be tricky for them as they like consistency.
“It’s important that our students feel calm and ready to learn, so activities such as watching a video on supermarkets and practicing shopping was very important.
“We also use story-telling to prepare the students, helping them understand the journey they will be undertaking and how it is relevant to their lives.
“Another tool when teaching students about money is using different sized blocks to represent different denominations. This helps us demonstrate visually that five dollars is less than ten dollars – that is really meaningful for the students. It gets them thinking about quantities of money and value, and you can really see when it clicked for them,” Sam says.
The students then made their way to the local shops and selected an item to buy from the class shopping list. They had the money to buy the item but also needed to understand that they couldn’t buy other items not on the list. They returned to school and together made pizzas from scratch which they divided equally amongst other students.
“Such programs are invaluable for our students, particularly as our goal is to help them go into work once they finish school. Having this kind of understanding of money and commerce is essential,” Sam says.
“As a specialist school, we depend on grants and other funding, such as the award from Ecstra, to allow us to continue running great programs for our students. Motivation is everything for these kids and being able to get out in the community and complete their goals helps unlock their potential and give them a real sense of achievement.”
Financial literacy module
Year: 2025
Teacher: Ms Bianca Drum
School: Marryatville High School, Adelaide
In 2022, Marryatville High School in South Australia introduced a financial literacy module into the curriculum for its year 9 and 10 students. Last year, mathematics and science teacher, Bianca Drum, developed the module further to help bring financial literacy to life for students.
“The previous model was very research-focussed, introducing financial topics to students and then getting them to do their own research into what different terms and subjects mean,” Bianca says.
“Our goal was to find a way to make it as relevant as possible to students’ lives and really engage them in the subject. Pleasingly, it is now probably our most engaged and involved class.”
One module introduced last year for year 10 students, Making Bank, looked at areas like budgeting, investing and wealth building, debt management, risk awareness, and data interpretation. It gave students a greater understanding of concepts such as mapping out income, taxes, living expenses and discretionary spending over different life stages.
“It was fascinating to see how involved the students became with the subject – I could almost see a lightbulb go off over their heads,” Bianca says.
“For example, as a maths teacher, I have taught students about compound interest in the past. But when we talked about the power of compound interest with savings, like superannuation, it really resonated with them, they were amazed at the difference this simple formula could make once they saw it in a real-life setting.
“Also, many of the students didn’t understand or even know about interest, and didn’t realise that they would need to pay it on a car loan, for example. We were able to talk about what they would end up actually paying on a car if they took out a loan, compared to saving the money first.
“It really emphasises the value of having stand-alone financial literacy studies, and not just relying on pure subjects such as mathematics or economics to teach these ideas,” Bianca says.
The module is being taught again this year and is continuing to develop to include concepts like ETFs. The aim is to expand it across the school, from years 7 to 12, using approaches suitable for each age group.
“For example, we can use games that bring awareness and understanding of some of the terminology, such as inflation, by looking at a list of canteen prices from 10 years ago and comparing it to the prices today,” Bianca says.
“It’s a fantastic way to get the students outside of the classroom and connected to the real world.
“There has never been such a greater need for financial literacy among young Australians and applying the knowledge to real life. Both our students and their parents have told us how much they enjoy the lessons, with some even going away and investing themselves,” she says.
