01
Structured curriculum
Kindergarten through Class 8. Behaviour, decisions, and money concepts taught age-appropriately.
Financial education for Indian schools.
A K–8 programme of curriculum, teacher certification, and assessment — built for CBSE and ICSE classrooms by a Chartered Accountant.
Founder backgroundPwCThermo Fisher ScientificSIBM PuneMIT World Peace UniversityICAI
The programme
Four components, one academic year.
A structured programme the school owns and delivers — not a content library, not an after-school app.
02
Teacher certification
A two-day workshop preparing classroom teachers to deliver the curriculum confidently.
03
Student assessment
Age-appropriate assessment materials that track progress through the academic year.
04
Money Smart School
Year-end certification recognising schools that complete the programme to standard.
A complete programme, not a content library.
A look inside
What a unit actually looks like.
Each grade gets eight behaviour-led units across the academic year. This is one of them.
Want, Need, Wait.
The difference between wanting and needing — and the discipline of waiting for a thing you can have, but haven’t yet earned.
- Week 1
- Recognising a want
- Week 2
- The cost of impatience
- Week 3
- The wait, the choice
- Week 4
- A family decision
- Week 5
- Earning vs. asking
- Week 6
- A small reward, decided well
Outcomes
What changes in a child over a year.
The programme is measured against behaviours, not test scores. These are the observable changes partner schools should expect to see, by stage, over a full academic year.
- Names the difference between wanting a thing and needing it, without prompting.
- Asks where money comes from when a family decision is being made.
- Waits — even briefly — before asking for a purchase in a shop.
- Recognises that things in a home have a cost, even when the cost is invisible.
- Explains, in their own words, why a family might say no to a purchase the family can afford.
- Identifies advertising on a screen and names what it is trying to do.
- Saves toward a named goal over weeks, not days.
- Notices when a friend is being pressured into a purchase and can describe what is happening.
- Reads a simple bill or receipt and explains what each line is for.
- Recognises a scam message or call and knows the rule that good things do not arrive uninvited.
- Holds a conversation about a family financial decision without anxiety or avoidance.
- Distinguishes between earning, receiving, and borrowing — and can say why the difference matters.
At year end, partner schools receive a written outcomes report by class and by term, prepared by the founder, documenting what changed and what did not.
Why this matters
The gap is documented.
27%
of Indian adults are financially literate, by the NCFE’s most recent national survey. The remaining 73% were never taught.
India’s National Education Policy 2020 places financial literacy among the life skills schools are expected to teach. Yet structured financial education in the K–5 years remains almost entirely absent from Indian classrooms.
Money Smart Kids exists to close that gap inside the school day — a programme schools own and certify, taught by their own teachers, measured through the year.
Financial education is not the teaching of money. It is the teaching of judgement — how to want, how to wait, how to decide, how to recognise when something is wrong. Money is the medium. Behaviour is the subject.
225M
Indian children
aged five to thirteen — the largest school-age cohort in the world.
~150
NCFE Money Smart Schools
out of ~1.5 million Indian schools. The structured supply is functionally absent.
0
Official K–5 programmes
India does not measure — or teach — financial literacy in children under eleven.
The approach
What we do differently.
Three commitments that shape every part of the programme.
01
Built for Indian classrooms
The curriculum is written for CBSE and ICSE contexts, in Indian English, with examples and scenarios drawn from Indian family life. It is not a Western framework translated.
02
Taught by trained teachers
The programme is delivered by the school’s own teachers, certified through a two-day workshop. No external instructor in the room. The school owns the capability after year one.
03
Measured through the year
Student progress is tracked against age-appropriate outcomes, not engagement metrics. The school sees what changed, by class, by term, in writing.
For schools
Who we are looking for.
Five founding-cohort schools in Pune for the 2026–27 academic year.
CBSE or ICSE board
The curriculum is mapped to both boards’ life-skills frameworks.
400+ students, K–8
Enough scale for the programme to land across multiple sections per class.
Leadership committed to life skills
Character and life-skill education is a stated part of the school’s identity, not an add-on.
Pune-based
The founding cohort is geographically concentrated so the founder is in classrooms regularly.
Year one is five schools. Year two opens nationally.
Founding cohort
Year one, in plain terms.
This is the founding year of Money Smart Kids. The 2026–27 cohort is five schools in Pune, and those five schools shape the programme in ways that later cohorts will not.
Founding-cohort schools receive direct founder presence in classrooms through the year, not a support email address. Pricing is locked for three academic years, insulated from later revisions. The school is named as a founding partner in all programme materials, case studies, and external communication from year two onward. And the curriculum itself is shaped, in part, by what the founding teachers tell us works and what does not — a level of input that closes once the programme scales.
We are explicit about this because principals deserve to know what they are signing up for. There are no prior case studies to point to. What there is, instead, is a Chartered Accountant in the room, a curriculum built before the first sale, and five schools who will have shaped Indian financial education in a way no later cohort can.
Questions principals ask
Before the first call.
How is this delivered in the classroom?
The programme runs as a regular weekly slot in the school timetable, taught by the school’s own classroom teachers using the Money Smart Kids curriculum, lesson plans, and assessment materials.
There is no external instructor. The school’s teachers are certified through a two-day workshop at the start of the year, and supported through the year by the founder.
What time commitment does it require from teachers?
The certification workshop runs for two consecutive days before the academic year begins. Each weekly classroom session is approximately thirty-five to forty-five minutes, with lesson plans and materials provided.
Preparation time is roughly twenty minutes per lesson once teachers are familiar with the format — comparable to any existing weekly subject.
What does the full programme cost, and what does it cover?
Founding-cohort pricing for 2026–27 is ₹2,500 to ₹4,000 per student for the full academic year, structured by school tier and the number of sections per grade. Pricing is locked for three academic years for the founding cohort.
The fee covers the full curriculum licence for Kindergarten through Class 8, teacher certification for the school’s classroom teachers, all student assessment materials and workbooks, the year-end written outcomes report, founding-partner recognition from year two onward, and direct founder support through the academic year.
For context: this sits in the same range as a structured phonics or robotics programme, and is one to two percent of annual fees in a typical Pune private school. The exact per-student figure for a specific school is confirmed in the first thirty-minute call once we have understood the school’s size and academic calendar.
What if we want to start with teacher training first?
A standalone two-day teacher certification workshop is available for schools that want to begin with teacher capability before committing to the full programme.
Workshop fees range from ₹50,000 to ₹2,00,000 per school, depending on the number of teachers certified and the depth of post-workshop support. The workshop alone does not include the student curriculum, assessment materials, or year-end certification — those are part of the full programme.
Schools that complete the workshop and move to the full programme in the same academic year receive the workshop fee credited against full programme cost.
Who owns the curriculum after the year ends?
The school holds an ongoing licence to use the curriculum and assessment materials with its students. Certified teachers retain their certification.
The intellectual property remains with Money Smart Kids; we continue to update and improve the curriculum each year, with updates available to all partner schools.
What if our school is not in Pune?
The founding cohort for 2026–27 is restricted to Pune so the founder can be present in classrooms regularly. National admissions open for the 2027–28 academic year.
Schools outside Pune are welcome to register interest now to be contacted first when the national application opens.
Founder
CA Rushabh Jamdade.
Rushabh is a Chartered Accountant with experience at PwC and Thermo Fisher Scientific, and teaches as visiting faculty at the Symbiosis Institute of Business Management, Pune, and MIT World Peace University.
He started Money Smart Kids after years of watching financially well-educated Indian adults struggle with everyday money decisions — and recognising that the foundations are laid in childhood, not college.
- Profession
- Chartered Accountant, ICAI
- Experience
- PwC · Thermo Fisher Scientific
- Faculty
- SIBM Pune · MIT WPU
I started this because I watched too many financially well-educated adults make poor money decisions in adulthood. The pattern is laid down earlier.
Contact
Start the conversation.
If your school feels like one of the five we are looking for, send a few details and we will be in touch within two working days.
Or write directly