What Money Means - for primary schools
Pupil'The work helped me in life because I can understand money more’
What Money Means is pfeg’s five-year programme to increase the quantity and quality of personal finance education in primary schools. Through working directly with teachers and pupils, What Money Means has been able to create a wealth of resources that have been successfully tried and rigorously tested in schools across England. Now, as the programme comes to its end in 2011, pfeg is disseminating all the good work to primary schools around the country.
Why learn about money at school?
'79% of parents believe it is important for children to learn about finance at school. Only 10% of parents said they had recieved financial education' - YouGov Research: The Recession and the importance of personal finance education.
Clearly, there is a need to educate and guide pupils, so that as they get older, and their finances potentially become more complex, they are equipped to make sensible financial decisions.
Is primary too young?
Money is something that all children have some understanding of; they see it, hear about it and occasionally will have some themselves. By working directly with primary schools, What Money Means has been able, to not only increase the level of understanding that pupils have about money, to raise awareness that they are capable of embracing this subject but also to build confidence in primary teachers.
Like all pupils, primary school children place a huge amount of trust in their teachers to answer queries they have about the subjects being taught. When it comes to money, many primary schools teachers feel that they are ill equipped to teach their pupils effectively, What Money Means is designed to help with this.
Who pays for this?
What Money Means is supported by HSBC with a considerably investment and involved many volunteers from across the organisation.
How does it fit in to the curriculum?
It’s important that pupils experience an engaging and coherent programme of personal finance education across the primary curriculum and school activities. What Money Means enables personal finance education to fit into literacy, drama, history, geography, citizenship and PSHE education as well as mathematics. It encourages teachers to be creative, experimental and innovative, offering a rich and varied learning for pupils.
How does it work?
What Money Means has generated a wealth of materials for teachers that will increase the quality of their personal finance education lessons. They are creative enough to inspire and flexible enough to fit into many areas of the curriculum. Including planning tools, activities and stimulus materials the resources have been extensively researched and thoroughly developed to create make them as effective and essential in teaching personal finance education.
pfeg and HSBC were named finalists for ‘Corporate Partnership of the year Award’ for their What Money programme at the Third Sector Awards 2010. The awards are organised by Third Sector Magazine and aim to reward examples of outstanding campaigns, strategies, projects and performance, backed up by hard evidence of success.
