For Teachers

For Teachers and Educators

You are welcome to use this book in your classroom. No permission needed.

Read it aloud, assign chapters, print extracts, build lessons around it — whatever works for your students. That’s what it’s for.

What this book is

No Money, No Clue is a twelve-chapter YA novel that follows Maya Hussain, sixteen, through her first year of earning, spending, and learning how money actually works. Set in Bradford, told in Maya’s voice, it covers every major PSHE financial education objective at KS3 and KS4 — not through worksheets, but through lived experience.

The novel is designed to work alongside PSHE, not replace it.

What students will be able to do after reading

• Read and understand a payslip (gross vs net, tax code, NI, deductions)
• Identify and correct an emergency tax code error
• Build a budget for variable income — not just a fixed-salary exercise
• Evaluate financial advice and finfluencer claims using a structured framework
• Understand what a credit score is, check a credit report, and dispute errors
• Recognise buy-now-pay-later as credit and assess its real cost
• Understand why some families distrust banks and how banking exclusion works
• Know what benefits their family may be entitled to and how to check

What the book covers that PSHE doesn’t

Six financial realities in the novel have no parallel anywhere in the PSHE Programme of Study:

• Emergency tax codes — being overtaxed on a first job, and how to fix it (Chapter 3)
• Banking exclusion — why some families rationally distrust banks, and what that means for access (Chapter 5)
• Family financial obligation — teens who contribute to household costs before they save (Chapter 5)
• No Recourse to Public Funds — working, paying tax, but unable to access the safety net (Chapter 10)
• Benefits entitlement — checking Universal Credit, finding unclaimed support, navigating the system (Chapter 10)
• Finfluencer business models — affiliate links, paid promotions disguised as advice, and how to see through them (Chapter 7)

How to use it

• PSHE resource — one chapter per session across 12 lessons, with discussion questions and curriculum mapping in the full guide
• English text — study as a complete KS4 novel for voice, narrative technique, and representation
• Form-time read — 15 minutes per week across a 12-week term, one chapter per session
• Independent reading — with follow-up tasks (budget challenge, credit report investigation, finfluencer audit, reflection letter)

Download the full curriculum guide — chapter-by-chapter teacher notes, PSHE objective mapping, cross-curricular links, discussion questions, and a section for parents.

Got questions or want to tell us how you’re using the book? Get in touch — we’d genuinely love to hear from you.

This page and the curriculum guide may be freely reproduced for educational use.