St. James’s Place
As a financial advice business, we are committed to enhancing financial resilience and confidence in all our communities. From the expert advice our advisers give to clients and the support we provide our employees, to the charities we work with and the help we give to those most vulnerable in society – we’re working hard to improve people’s financial lives. We believe that providing children and young people with a meaningful financial education is essential to improving financial capability in the UK. This is why financial education in schools is a key focus of the work we do in communities.
Through our financial education initiatives, we aim to develop children and young people’s understanding of money and the confidence to manage their personal finances. Ultimately, we want to help them make good choices when it comes to earning, managing and growing their money.
Our financial education focus for the past year has been two-fold:
Increasing our reach
Our employees and advisers have delivered 68 financial education sessions so far this year, reaching more than 1,500 young people. This is through our own financial education programmes and supporting RedSTART’s Change the Game programme.
Our support for Young Enterprise’s Centre of Excellence for Financial Education programme continues into its second year during 2024.
This prog
ramme aims to embed financial education across the school’s curriculum with the support of a Financial Education consultant. During 2022/23 we reached 5,745 children by sponsoring seven schools on the programme and were delighted to see our first school, Tonge Moor School, achieve their Centres of Excellence status in November 2023. This academic year, we have enabled a further six schools to enrol on the programme and aim to increase this to 21 schools by the end of 2025.
In addition to this, we continue to see teachers from schools in areas of deprivation (those with a 1-4 rating on the Indices of Multiple Deprivation) accessing the free Young Enterprise Financial Education lesson plans, which we helped to fund. So far this year, the lesson plans have been downloaded 253 times.
At the start of the year, we were also pleased to see the results from a research project that we funded in 2022. Young Enterprise conducted research into financial education in SEND settings with the view of making financial education accessible to more people. The findings are now being used to inform new SEND financial education resources for schools.
Deepening our impact
Building strong relationships with the schools on year 2 of their Centres of Excellence journey has been a focus for us this year. Our employees and advisers have run additional financial education sessions, careers days and volunteering days for some of the schools we’re working with to ensure they get the maximum benefit from the programme and our relationship.
In May this year, we also began to see early results from RedSTART’s Change the Game longitudinal study. The study is being carried out over five years to understand whether financial education in schools has tangible benefits for young people. We have supported the project through funding and volunteering for the last three years. Early findings are showing small-to-medium positive effects on children’s financial knowledge after one year on the programme. It’s also had a small positive impact on students’ financial ability, mindset, and connection to financial education resources.
