Personal Finance Education Group's 'Learning Money Matters'

1. Description of the programme
2. The study
3. Key findings
4. Points to consider

Description of the programme

The ultimate aim of the Learning Money Matters (LMM) programme was to equip school-leavers with the skills, knowledge and confidence they need to make well-informed financial decisions and to engage with the financial services sector. It aimed to do this by providing schools and teachers with support and consultancy around the provision of personal financial education (PFE) to 11 – 18 year olds.

More specifically, the programme attempted to:

• provide teachers with support and resources, and help them develop confidence and competence to deliver PFE effectively;
• help schools to develop a coherent scheme for PFE across different areas of the curriculum; and
• improve the financial knowledge, understanding and confidence of young people in secondary schools in England.

The programme was established by the personal financial education group (pfeg) and ran from 2006 to 2011. It was delivered by trained pfeg consultants across the five regions: North West, North East, Central, South East and South West. Pfeg consultants coached individual teachers and advised on schools’ PFE plans, often providing lessons plans. At the time of publication the LMM programme had been used in 3,239 secondary schools and colleges in England.

The study

One independent impact evaluation of the LMM programme (carried out by the National Foundation for Educational Research) has been published. The programme’s evaluation covers the period April 2007-July 2009. This summary is based on the second of two evaluation reports, which includes findings from both phases of the evaluation.

The evaluation involved a telephone survey with key school contacts (undertaken with 109 schools in the second year of the evaluation) and case-study visits to 28 schools over the two years of evaluation which included interviews with teachers and students. The second report detailed findings from analysis of the pfeg database, the second year telephone survey of schools and the case study visits in year 1 and 2 of the evaluation. The student quantitative data presented in the report is based on students at 24 case study schools: the sample included 214 students in Year 1 and 167 students in Year 2. Thus the findings are from a small sub-sample of all LMM participating schools. No comparison group was used.

Key findings

The evaluation assesses the impact of PFE lessons on students and teachers in secondary schools involved in the LMM programme. As stated in the LLM evaluation report, the impacts cannot be attributed directly to LMM but rather LMM should be viewed as a contributing factor to the successes of the PFE lessons.

Bearing that in mind, the evaluation found positive changes in relation to the following outcomes:

Outcomes for students:

Financial capability (Mindset):

• Following PFE there was a 13% increase in the proportion of students who thought it was important to save regularly.
• Prior the PFE lessons, 31% of the students interviewed stated they felt ‘very confident’ about looking after or managing their own money, a proportion that rose to 42% following the lessons. The proportion of interviewees responding to the statement with the answer that they would be ‘not at all confident’ reduced by 12%.
• However there was a 14% reduction in the proportion of students’ agreeing with the statement that ‘it is worth saving if you want to buy something expensive’. It was found that the programme made very little difference to students' already careful attitudes towards borrowing.
• Interview data also revealed a positive impact of the PFE lessons on students’ attitudes towards learning about finance, at school. Prior to the PFE lessons, 82% of interviewees stated that it was important to receive PFE lessons, rising to 87% afterwards. The programme also increased the proportion of students who thought that the school environment was the most important influence in their learning on money and finance, rising from 10% to 28% following PFE sessions.

Financial capability (Ability):

• Following the PFE lessons, the proportion of students stating that they knew ‘a lot’ about budgeting doubled from 19% to 38%.
• Additionally, a short ‘quiz’ was administered to students, to measure their knowledge in relation to topics they had studied within their PFE lessons. A positive change in students’ knowledge was identified in 17 of the 24 schools in which pre and post-delivery visits were conducted.

Outcomes for teachers:

Confidence to teach PFE: Two thirds (66%) of teachers thought that LLM had increased their confidence to teach PFE.

Points to consider

• The LMM encouraged schools to adapt resources to their specific needs when delivering PFE.
• The majority of schools delivered PFE through their personal, social and health education (PHSE) subject, although it was also integrated into other subjects such as citizenship or mathematics.
• The changes in students attitudes and knowledge after receiving PFE lessons varied across schools depending on the topics taught, the age and maturity of students, teaching approaches and the number of lessons received.
• As the evaluation did not involve a comparison group against which outcomes could be compared, the impact data cannot be directly attributed to the LMM programme.

Full report

Full research report