If we are serious about making our students financially literate, as everyone from the government to Dragons’ Den investors seem to wish, we can do better than just trotting out the usual lessons on credit. Let’s teach students about criminomics, too.

There is a paradox in teaching financial literacy. On the one hand, pupils need to gain the practical skills that take the financial world on trust - for without such trust it would be impossible to exist as a consumer or citizen in the 21st century.

At the same time, we also need to emphasise the “bad orchard theory” of finance. Students should be made aware not only that fraud exists but that plenty of corrupt financial practices are perfectly legal; that such activity is not the result of a few bad apples, not even a bad barrel, but the fact that the whole orchard is, occasionally, infested.

To use a dietary analogy, nutrition advice would be foolhardy without mention of unhealthy foods and diets. Similarly, financial literacy should not neglect to mention junk finance, with its monetary equivalents of saturated fats and worthless calories that threaten the financial health and wellbeing of consumers.

I would advocate a balanced approach - one that fuses practical advice with a positively cynical appreciation of finance. For the pedagogical purpose of classroom teaching, this works best when looking at finance through the prism of crime or what can be called criminomics. Let me explain with the aid of classroom-based exercises that make use of hypothetical situations.

Fakes and frauds

Here is one hypothetical example that I use: students should imagine that they are part of a counterfeiting operation (counterfeiting is the second most valuable illicit market behind narcotics) with some other school friends, producing merchandise connected with the film Frozen - T-shirts, toys, mugs, etc. The group of school counterfeiters have become really good at what they do, making way in excess of £30,000 per month (£10,000 per pupil). The question you then pose is this: what do you do with all this hard cash?

The task gets students to think of money as being far from neutral, but something that can help hide sinister intentions. It also highlights how mainstream and illicit economies are not separate from each other, but are part of an integrated system, with finance the connecting bridge between the two.

As well as the money-laundering scenario, the teaching of financial literacy could include role plays where students act out the difference between the misselling and the fraudulent sale of financial products. Alternatively, students could think about the best way of creating a scam involving everyday financial services - say an MOT. Or one useful criminomic poser would be to get students to devise a dodgy pension scheme while staying within the law - that’s quite an easy one, probably something for a beginners’ class.

How about a version of Cluedo? Let’s call it TaxDodgo and you have to guess the identity of the tax evader, together with the method or tools of evasion and the location - probably somewhere exotic. It might also be worth contacting the likes of the Financial Services Authority to see if it has materials that could be used in financial literacy (they know the skeletons in the closet).

The purpose of criminomics, if you like, is to give financial literacy some light-touch theory of a cynical kind. Practical finance without some theory is blind acceptance; a theory of finance without practical advice is just empty. A Pollyannaish exposure to finance is not real education or literacy, but mere industry PR.

Michael Marinetto is senior lecturer in business ethics at Cardiff Business School, Cardiff University