Hi. In this post, I cover this new financial literacy graduation requirement for high school students in the Ontario, Canada.
This news is fairly recent on April 26, 2026 according to CTV news.
Starting in the 2026–2027 school year, students who began Grade 9 in the 2025–2026 school year or later, must meet a financial literacy graduation requirement to earn their high school diploma.
Students will complete this requirement as part of their compulsory Grade 10 Career Studies course. The requirement consists of learning modules and test questions developed by TVO and provided to schools to administer.
The requirement assesses core financial literacy concepts from the Grades 1 to 9 curriculum and supports the Grade 10 Career Studies course.
To meet the requirement, students:
- have up to 2 attempts during the course
- must earn at least 70% on the modules
Once a student meets the graduation requirement, it will be recorded on their Ontario Student Transcript.
Results from the modules count for 5% of the student’s final grade in the Grade 10 Career Studies course.
Financial Literacy For Students Is Good
Teaching young students the basics of finance is good. Topics can include:
- Needs Versus Wants
- Maslow's Hierarchy Of Needs
- Calculating Taxes and Discounts
- Unit Price & Which Is A Better Buy?
- Budgeting
- Foreign Exchange Basics & Exchanging Money
- Cost of Living In Different Areas/Countries
- Spending Versus Saving
- Compound Interest
- Stock Market Basics
- Supply and Demand
These topics can be taught be young students in different grades. The topics may be included in math classes or in business classes.
How Would This Turn Out?
This announcement from the Doug Ford Ontario government sounds nice and all but I do have my concerns. The Doug Ford Conservative government in Ontario did cut teacher jobs recently and did implement financial literacy and programming education for Ontario schools. The computer programming topics seemed a bit too rigorous as they wanted grade ones to learn programming. Young kids should learn how to read, write, speak and develop sentences before learning how to code.
The already implemented financial literacy topics is kind of weird to me. In some grade seven math lessons, they have the students learning about compound interest. My issue with this is that a grade seven student may not know what an exponent is from math. Exponents are needed to learn how to calculate compound interest.
I am interested to see what some of the questions would look like. Would the questions be fair? Would the selected topics be math heavy? Is the test online or on paper?
Thank you for reading.