Sir – I am a qualified secondary maths. teacher, with extensive personal finance experience both in and outside of the school classroom.

Earlier this year, I was involved in a project to integrate personal finance into secondary schools’ maths programmes of study within counties that border Oxfordshire.

This was very much arranged on an ad hoc voluntary basis and the amount of assistance depended on schools’ requests.

I am naturally very conscious of the importance of personal finance education, life being much more complicated for students of 2011 more than ever before.

I am now undertaking work on behalf of a charity providing presentations on debt avoidance, free of charge, to secondary school students.

I am aware of the Martin Lewis’ HM Government e-petition whereby he is encouraging the public to support him in gaining a parliamentary debate on personal finance within education. He requires 100,000 signatures.

I have written to councillors in three dozen councils including Oxfordshire (gaining the personal support of councillor Charles Mathew) asking if they would be prepared to consider adding their names to the petition.

Currently more than 73,000 people (at time of typing) have already added their details to the government petition website.

I am hoping that some of your readers might be supportive of such a worthwhile cause. Interested parties should copy and paste the following webpage into the Internet: https://submissions.epetitions.

direct.gov.uk/petitions/8903 Please can I thank your readers in advance for their urgent consideration.

Caroline Stephens, Chippenham