From financial literacy to online education: novel approaches to financial law teaching in the United Kingdom

Abstract

Financial law has been indispensably embedded into UK legal education during the last 15 years. On-campus and online programmes reflect a growing need for specialist finance lawyers globally. It is a booming, but specialised area of law without agreed foundations for how we are teaching financial law. Drawing on authentic learning and constructive alignment theories, this article suggests a triangulation of metacognition, financial literacy and online education as novel approaches. Such financial law pedagogy focuses on metacognition and financial literacy as structuring principles for the students’ learning. Further, this method draws on financial education concepts developed in the EU and UK with convergent roots. The outcome is new classroom approaches connecting the principles of financial law with its practice. The digital transformation, accelerated by Covid-19, has encouraged UK universities to expand their financial law teaching and offer fully online taught programmes. Despite regulatory divergence post-Brexit, the EU’s supranational dimension with its unique Single Supervisory Mechanism (SSM) remains a cornerstone of the UK curriculum. Financial law with its dichotomy of regulation and private law stands out as a key example of the changing nature of 21st century legal education: combining financial literacy and metacognition as pedagogical models against the backdrop of integrating online learning theory.