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.

In the last academic year (2020/2021) and despite the challenges of remote learning, over 600 My Personal Finance Skills sessions were conducted across the UK reaching over 20,000 students.

In 2021, My Personal Finance Skills collaborated with ITN News Productions to showcase positive impact of the programme featuring students, teachers and Education Champions. The video can be accessed here.

Financial education workshops

Our financial education material is aimed at students aged 12-18 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 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
• Opening your first bank account – understanding the process of opening the first bank account
• Understanding credit and debt – understanding the difference between debit, credit and debt, good and bad debt
• Loans & mortgages – how student loans and mortgages work

Adapting to requests from our partners schools, My Personal Finance Skills developed a series of 30-minute personal finance talks covering scams, life after school and personal finance basics that can be delivered in an assembly slot.

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.