You're in a shop and the person at the till gives you ten pounds too much in change. Do you thank your lucky stars or give it back? There's a job you want, but you don't have all the qualifications. Do you risk a little creative fiction on your application form, or do you tell the truth and take your chance? You're short of money and you could get some by massaging your expense account. It wouldn't make much difference to the company but it would make a big difference to you. What do you do? Most of us face decisions like these, and it matters to us as individuals, and collectively as a society, whether we do what's right, or simply what we think we can get away with.

Which is why, in two days time, the Secretary of state for education, David Blunkett, and I, will be launching a new curriculum for schools, called 'Money and Morals.' It's about ethics in the work-place and the market place, and it's been put together by one of the organisations I'm proudest of having a share in: the Jewish Association of Business Ethics.

We launched it just under ten years ago, in the belief that business really is a moral enterprise. I know that might sound odd, if you believe that ethics is for wimps, that companies are simply there to make money, that business is a game in which, by fair means or foul, winner takes all. But that's not what I've learned from the most successful business people I've known. Yes, they say, you can make a quick profit by being unscrupulous; but it never lasts, and you lose in the end. Real success depends on fairness to customers, decency to employees, quality in what you sell and integrity in how you sell it. Or, as one of the country's leading financial journalists told me: "It's all in the Bible really - fair weights, fair measures, decency to the people you work with, and above all honesty, or what the Bible calls justice."

So, having taken ethical debate into some of our leading boardrooms, we're now taking it to schools. It's an imaginative project; not preachy or judgmental. It's based on case studies put together by the business people and financial journalists to reflect the real world. And a survey of 34,000 teenagers in England and Wales tells us that education does make a difference. Children who've had been exposed to strong ethical guidelines do act with more integrity and responsibility. For once biblical prophets and company profits coincide. Morality works; which is why work needs a moral sense.

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