FE0090

Written Evidence Submitted Barclays

About Barclays LifeSkills

Since 2013, the Barclays LifeSkills programme has helped millions of people to build the core transferable skill, knowledge, confidence, and connections they need to get into or progress in work, whether that’s a young person preparing for their first job to someone wanting to make changes in their career or even start their own business. The programme provides free lesson plans, modules, and interactive tools to support educators with young people or adult learners, plus access to online tools and resources for independent learners and families. 

For further information, please visit www.barclayslifeskills.com. 

About Barclays
Barclays is a British universal bank.  We are diversified by business, by different types of customer and client, and geography.  Our businesses include consumer banking and payments operations around the world, as well as a top-tier, full service, global corporate and investment bank, all of which are supported by our service company which provides technology, operations, and functional services across the Group.  For further information about Barclays, please visit our website www.barclays.com
 

What should we be teaching young people about money? What should financial education include and are there any aspects missing from the current provision?

Financial education should cover the critical areas of financial knowledge to support young people’s financial resilience.  Teaching students about money and finance naturally leads them to start planning and developing their careers pathways.  This is more important than ever, given exacerbated socio-economic deprivation and the widening attainment gap. Financial education is one part of the interlinked capabilities that ensure young people have the education, and practical skills to set themselves up successfully for employment.

This includes budgeting for their own personal finances as well as being able to transfer that learning to the workplace, managing their salary, understanding a payslip, taxation, and national insurance.  Other aspects should focus on saving, borrowing, insurance, fraud, living independently and investing to enable them to be able to run their own household in the future.

Our annual evaluation highlights that teachers already having discussions about the cost of rent and council tax and the salary needed to cover these help students to appreciate the importance of employability skills and career planning.

It’s important that digital payment methods are included in financial education as the way we use money changes. We also believe that ensuring that all financial education resources carry a quality mark (LifeSkills has the Young Money mark) is essential as this ensures teachers know which resources are high quality.

Where should financial education sit within the National Curriculum between the ages of 11 and 16? To what extent does its current position within the curriculum limit the amount of delivery time it receives? Should financial education form part of a core subject, such as mathematics?

Our evaluation with teachers each year who are already facilitating excellent learning in this area shows that financial education is embedded across multiple areas such as PSHE, Careers and Maths and taught flexibly within the existing curriculum throughout a young persons’ education.

We know from our annual evaluation that non-Maths teachers find it easy to teach personal finance using LifeSkills.

Currently PSHE is the main vehicle for teaching personal finance skills in school. Ofsted’s attention to Personal Development also means there is a lot more attention to PSHE as a curriculum area in schools; it’s less likely to be squeezed out in favour of subject-teaching on which schools’ accountability – GCSE and A level results – are based. Therefore, many more schools are looking into curriculum guidance for PSHE which is not compulsory for them; and they follow it in their efforts to ensure their Personal Development work is ready to stand up to Ofsted’s scrutiny. This is important as it creates more opportunities for teaching personal finance in schools. As such, we do not think there is a case for changing its current position within the curriculum.

What steps should be taken to support teachers and schools in their delivery of financial education?

We believe that schools have an important role to play in delivering quality financial education to young people.   Many dedicated teachers across the country are already facilitating excellent learning in this area, the current barriers focus on the lack of teacher time and having the space in the curriculum for financial education to ensure consistency across all schools.

Teachers are telling us anecdotally that priorities in schools continue to be challenging due to the impact of the pandemic, with a continued focus on assisting students who have fallen behind, coupled with increased pressures on the school timetable.

More consistent training and support should be given to teachers to enable them to deliver financial education with confidence and clarity.

Our research this year was particularly clear that the issue of teacher confidence in teaching personal finance skills is becoming less severe. Even several years ago, references to difficulties of teaching personal finance skills for non-specialist teachers were visible in virtually all our interviews with schools in England. In contrast, this year the reverse was true: our interviewees confirmed that neither they personally nor their colleagues had notable difficulties when teaching personal finance. We investigated this further and identified two primary reasons why the situation related to teacher confidence and expertise of teaching personal finance might be changing.

Firstly, considerable efforts are being made in schools across England to systematise and assure quality of PSHE lessons, form and tutor time and other timetabled activities that support students’ personal development. Our research suggests that, to a considerable extent, this appears to be a reflection of changes to Ofsted’s inspection framework, which placed much greater priority on Personal Development, with it becoming one of the key dimensions of Ofsted inspections. One of the consequences of schools across the country trying to scrutinise and improve the quality of how they approach their provision for supporting students’ personal development is centralised planning for PSHE lessons, tutor, and mentor time and similar, which is becoming increasingly common. This means that school staff teaching PSHE and tutor/mentor time sessions have lesson plans for those sessions prepared for them by a colleague responsible for PSHE or personal development in the school. Where teachers do not need to prepare programmes of study or even lesson plans themselves but instead, they get told what to deliver in each lesson or session, with all materials and resource being prepared for them, this significantly diminishes the level of demand on their confidence and expertise. Schools tell us that resources like Barclays LifeSkills make it very easy for teachers to deliver the content, once they have been directed to do it and there are timetabled slots for these inputs.

Secondly, it is evident that high quality resources for teaching personal finance skills, which contain the relevant knowledge that non-specialist teachers might be lacking but also designed specifically for the educators to use with their learners, perform a professional development function for teachers, particularly given that most school practitioners find it exceptionally hard to complete training courses and programmes due to time and other constraints [1]. Evidence from our annual surveys of educators who use LifeSkills resources for teaching personal finance (in many cases they do this alongside teaching other important life skills) is extremely positive about the value of those teaching resources for teachers’ own confidence and expertise in the subject, with more than eight in ten teachers every year noting improvements and more than a third stating that such improvements were substantial (i.e. that their own knowledge and expertise ‘improved a lot’ as a result of engaging with LifeSkills).

So, while we know that pre-prepared resources improve teacher confidence, we think more should be done to ensure that all teachers are directed to deliver personal finance skills content, with dedicated slots made available in timetables.

Should the provision of financial education in schools be extended beyond key stages three and four. Is there scope for it to be embedded more extensively at primary-school level?

Financial education should form part of the core curriculum from key stage one to four as we recognise the importance of supporting children by educating them on how to manage money from an early age, when money habits are formed.

There are already a good range of quality resources available that enable teachers and community leaders to deliver a comprehensive and meaningful financial education across a range of educational settings, including our own LifeSkills programme; and it’s important to ensure that Primary School educators are aware of what is available to them.

The inclusion of financial education in the National Curriculum would allow primary schools to have a

greater focus on financial capability. This has been shown to be the case across the devolved nations.

The Government has outlined proposals to ensure that all students study some form of maths up until the age of 18 – should financial education be included in these plans and, if so, how?

Low numeracy skills and maths anxiety contribute to poor employment prospects, financial exclusion, and impacts educational attainment so it is vital for young people to build the confidence with numbers and financial education. This should then continue throughout their life stages, to help them manage their money and understand how this links to the world of work. 

The intensity of financial education at 16-19 should depend on the young person, their circumstances and existing knowledge of financial education and what they have already been taught throughout Primary and Secondary education.

February 2024