The Personal Finance Society

The Personal Finance Society’s My Personal Finance Skills programme delivers free financial education workshops to schools across the UK via a network of over 900 volunteers.  Volunteers are personal finance professionals and members of the Personal Finance Society. The Personal Finance Society (part of the Chartered Insurance Institute Group) is the leading UK professional body for financial planners and those in related roles.  Both the Personal Finance Society and Chartered Insurance Institute are focused on engendering public confidence and trust in the personal finance profession by setting standards and increasing professionalism.

Over the past year and until lockdown put a pause on our in-school offer, over 560 workshops reaching 15,000+ students were delivered as part of the My Personal Finance Skills programme.  For the 2020 academic year, virtual workshops delivered via Zoom/MS Teams have started taking place so that schools can continue to benefit from free financial education during the pandemic.  The in-school options will resume once it is safe to do so.

Financial education workshops

Our financial education material is aimed at students aged 14-18 and workshops have been designed to fit within a typical 1-hour school timetabled lesson.

Resources enable our Education Champions (volunteers) to deliver stand-alone workshops aimed at raising the financial competency of students.   The content has been created in collaboration with Young Money, a trusted knowledge provider, who have also quality marked the resources.

The themes covered in our first series of workshops:

• Moving on from school – student finance, earning, tax, NI, pensions.
• My future finances – enabling students to develop their understanding of the value of everyday expenditure.
• Making decisions & risk -students gain an understanding of their attitude to risk and how this can influence financial choices they make.
• Staying safe – Identifying financial scams.

Following the success of our initial series of workshops, the programme will soon add new personal finance workshop & talks to its collection.

The My Personal Finance Skills initiative also has a dedicated website that aims to provide extra learning opportunities to students. This includes on demand session, bitesize learning, and a student money blog.