After just one year’s exposure to the programme, we’ve seen a statistically significant small-to-medium-sized positive effect on children’s financial knowledge.
There was widespread buy-in across the board from school teachers and senior leaders, who have said they found the delivery model and programme resources to be high quality, efficient, and relatively burden-free in terms of their day-to-day work, which indicates that our longer-term goals on sustainability and scalability are realistic.
Our fantastic corporate volunteers who provide invaluable support are also championed as an efficient way to improve learning activities, with the added benefit of introducing children to adults from varied walks of life who can share insights that they may not otherwise have access to.
Indeed, feedback from a Year 6 pupil who attended a workshop session held at a corporate partners’ office was that it was one of the best things they’d done while at school, and his aim was to get a job within that firm in future.
Strong engagement
Last – and most definitely not least – there’s strong engagement from the children who want to talk about the programme beyond the sessions themselves.
At a recent event at one of our participating schools, a child’s parents told me that their daughter had become so much better with money thanks to her involvement in Change the Game and was always talking about saving and what she wants to buy next in a way she had never done previously.
That we’ve seen an impact on participating students at this very early stage of the study is an extremely positive sign that a full programme of learning across a number of years will help to improve children’s financial literacy.
But we’re not stopping there. This year we’ll be working with a new cohort of reception children (aged 4 to 5 years old) for the first time, which will see the study expand to around 60 schools, including six in Wales, and around 6,000 children in total.
We’re also rolling out a bank app, in which pupils earn virtual money through maths games, manage it through current and savings accounts, and spend on real items in a physical school shop – using real-world examples and practical experience to bring to life how to save, spend and budget.
Our goal is to develop a strong case and blueprint for how to make it impactful and sustainable through a structured ladder of consistent, repeated learning.
It’s clearly early days, but these initial signs have left me feeling positive for the future – and until the government creates and rolls out a proper lifetime financial education strategy, starting in primary school, I don’t intend to stop trying to change the game anytime soon.
