Learning Money Matters - project summary
Learning Money Matters was a pfeg initiative aimed at increasing and improving personal finance education in secondary schools in England, so that all young people would leave school with the financial knowledge, skills and confidence they need to live full adult lives.
It ran from April 2006 - March 2011 and was supported by the Money Advice Service. Throughout the five years, Learning Money Matters worked with 4,259 secondary schools across England.
It offered free advice, support and resources to schools and teachers who wanted to teach personal finance education in a way that fitted an individual school's needs, with the help of a nationwide network of consultants.
Why it was needed
The level of debt in the UK was at an all time high, particularly among people under the age of 40. We needed to educate young people so that they could understand how to manage their money, how to shop around among the vast array of financial products and services on offer, and how to save for the future.
The Learning Money Matters approach was designed to ease the pressure on teachers by helping them integrate personal finance into the work they were already doing. If they didn’t feel confident about money issues themselves, we were able to help with that too.
Across the curriculum
Learning Money Matters helped teachers introduce personal finance in all areas of the curriculum. For example:
- in Personal Social Health and Economic education students could look at managing family budgets
- in citizenship, students could look at taxation and what the government uses it for
- in enterprise education, students might study how to write a business plan and assess financial risk
- in mathematics they can calculate the cost of taking different summer holidays
- students can look at the use of the Euro in modern foreign languages
- in geography, they could study the implications of our consumer choices on peoples' lives in other countries.
How it was supported
In April 2006 the Financial Services Authority (FSA) - the independent body which regulates the finance industry - committed £17 million over five years to fund Learning Money Matters. In the first year significant contributions also came from Bank of America, AEGON and UBS.
A new independant body, CFEB (Consumer Financial Education Body) was then formed to take over the FSA's role and on4 April 2011 CFEB became the Money Advice Service, a new independent advice organisation set up to help everyone understand and manage their money better.
What was the impact?
The Learning Money Matters project was successfully completed at the end of March 2011, by which time we had made sure that finance education was being taught in 4,259 secondary schools, giving 1.8 million students the opportunity to learn about money management in a way that works for them.
