Learning Life Skills At School

We recently wrote a post which had people complaining about the things they were taught at school which turned out to have no bearing on their life including things such as Pi and Shakespeare but on the flip side, if we were to scrap things such as Calculus, the Periodic Table and learning how to play the playing the recorder we would have a large gap in the school day to fill so what should they teach instead?
The jump from sitting behind a school to adulthood in the real world is a big transition and there are some key life skills which you just have to bumble through somehow so a recent poll found that the practical skills which have a tangible use in the adult world they wished they knew about on leaving school are
buying a house, setting up a pension, banking and direct debits for bills, starting a business, paying taxes and how to change a tyre.
The argument is that the national curriculum is provided to give students a level of education so they can deal with the adult world but clearly there is a lot of things being spent time and effort teaching which is irrelevant once you’ve left the education setting so there is a gap there for when you have to brush up against things like the Banks, insurance companies and HM Revenue and Customs which can be quite daunting.