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Back to school…and new financial education lessons

Children in England and Wales will be returning to school for a new term, with a brand new addition to their curriculum – financial education is now being taught in schools having just become compulsory there.

 

RBS has been supporting financial education in schools in the UK for the past 20 years, including in Ireland where it has been a compulsory part of the curriculum since 2009 and in Scotland where it was introduced in 2010. During that time, RBS has been working with educators across the UK to equip teachers to deliver financial education through a range of programmes. 

Support available to schools and families for financial education includes: 

MoneySense for Schools programme for 11-18 year olds, which is currently delivered in around 56% of secondary schools across UK and Ireland. MoneySense has reached over 1 million young people since 2011.  14,000+ teachers and 85,000 students are registered on the website and regularly use the resources. From our 2014 MoneySense survey, 6 in 10 registered MoneySense teachers say they will use the site more now that personal financial education is mandatory.

Pocket Money online resources for 7-11 year olds. Pocket Money is full of engaging activities for children and their families to learn about money together. It also includes a range of lesson plans for primary school teachers. Pocket Money won “Best Education site” in the 2013 Good Web Guide Awards. 

As well as creating programmes to deliver this vital part of young people’s learning, RBS has also been involved in the APPG Select Committee Report into Financial Education. The campaign was led by the Personal Financial Education Group (pfeg), who successfully lobbied the UK government to include financial education as a core curriculum subject in England and Wales from this month. 

RBS continues to work with pfeg by directly supporting the development of teachers as a way of ensuring that the fundamentals of financial education and mathematics are well embedded with this group. These key influencers of young people are supported through two programmes:

• The Introducing Financial Mathematics guide was published in October 2013. The resource is free to download on the pfeg website and maps the opportunities for teachers to deliver financial mathematics and education within the curriculum and suggests ways to use the MoneySense modules to support teaching and learning.

• Starting this month, RBS is pioneering an Initial Teacher Training programme at 14 universities and schools. This aims to develop 250 maths teachers as financial education ambassadors each year over two years, ensuring that the subject is embedded within the schools that they teach in over the long term. 

You can read more about young people’s attitude to their finances and money management in our 2013 MoneySense Report which was the culmination of five years of annual research and reports. Over 50,000 young people aged 12-19 were surveyed and the research was contextualised against the backdrop of key social and economic events between 2008-2013, like bank bailouts, the change in government and the collapse of high street shopping chains.  

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