Children's Wellbeing and Schools Bill

Written evidence submitted by MyBnk (CSWB115)

   The Children’s Wellbeing and Schools Bill

About Us

MyBnk is a financial education charity dedicated to creating a financially fluent population where financial literacy is considered a right for all.

Everyone needs to be able to manage their money . Yet almost two-thirds of young people do not recall receiving any financial education at all, and 53 per cent are worried that they will never be financially secure. Poor financial literacy is central to many problems young people face today, including rising mental health issues, homelessness and unemployment.

MyBnk aims to bridge this gap, working with over 40,000 young people across the UK every year, delivering expert-led, high-impact financial education programmes on topics such as saving, debt and student finance. We want to bring the language of money to life so that everyone can navigate their money with confidence, no matter where they started.

Our Work in Context

Since 2007, MyBnk has empowered over 300,000 young people, helping them learn how to manage their money and live independently. We realise that themes such as saving, budgeting and taxes can be boring or overwhelming for young people, so our programmes use innovative, engaging teaching methods to bring these topics to life.

Financial education is a crucial life skill which must begin at an early age. Many life habits are formed from the age of 7, so fostering financial literacy and cultivating positive money habits should also start from that age. In 2011, MyBnk successfully campaigned alongside others for money lessons to become part of England’s national curriculum in secondary schools, however financial education has not been properly embedded across the curriculum and too many children still leave school without any of this teaching at all.

Furthermore, important though it is, financial education in schools is just the beginning. Teaching a 10-year-old about mortgages won't help them if they won't purchase a home until the age of 37. Instead, financial education must be recognised as a life-long skill, particularly important during significant transitional moments such as leaving home, going to university, and entering the workforce. Alongside our work with schools, our young adult programmes have shown significant impact, highlighting the fact that financial education is most needed for those that can’t afford to make mistakes.

MyBnk’s Response

Children’s social care – local authorities/care leavers

Care leavers often face challenges, such as living independently at a young age or navigating a ‘cliff-edge’ when support from their local authority stops abruptly, that make managing their finances more difficult. A lack of money skills, coupled with an ongoing cost of living crisis, can result in precarious circumstances for these young people. The lack of a support network around them means that financial mistakes will be far more costly for care leavers; bluntly, they cannot afford to make financial mistakes in the way others can. This is why it is so essential that care leavers receive support with financial literacy before they leave care. The Government, local authorities and care homes all need to be clear about exactly what they require to make the transition to independent living.

MyBnk’s The Money House programme [1] helps care leavers in, or about to move into, independent housing manage their money and maintain their tenancy. Participants gain practical, financial and digital skills to help them pay their rent on time, keep up with bills and budget their living costs. We explain how they can make informed choices about their future and teach them how to best manage their money, to prevent homelessness. Care leavers can be referred, self-refer, or come along to a session as part of a group. The impact of these sessions is reflected in the numbers: they result in a 32% reduction in young people failing to keep up with priority payments; up to £2.92 social value is delivered for every £1 spent; and less than 2% of attendees have faced eviction.

However, a key challenge MyBnk’s trainers face in delivering these sessions for care leavers lies in reaching them in the first place. We know that, across the UK, many more young people could benefit from our sessions but are currently beyond our reach due to inconsistent provision across different local authorities and care homes. Whilst in some places we have established strong relationships in the local authority that allow us to reach a greater number of young people, this is not the case in all areas, where varying levels of engagement with local authorities create disparities in access to our programmes.

As such, MyBnk welcomes the requirements in the Bill for local authorities to publish information about the services they offer in their area for children in kinship care and for them to include information on procedures to ensure a supportive transition to independent living in their published local offer for care leavers. We hope that this can include signposting care leavers to The Money House where we are currently able to offer this. This would help to ensure that we can reach care leavers at the time they most need us; currently, many are in school full-time and miss out on our programmes before they leave care and disappear off our natural radar.

Having said that, MyBnk would sound one word of caution to the Government on this point. We are all too aware of the demands on local authorities’ over-stretched resources. When we commissioned research on care leavers in 2022 [2] , which found that 89% of UK care leavers reported problems when trying to access financial education support, a third of local authorities failed to respond to us within the statutory timeline under our Freedom of Information requests due to the impact of the pandemic. Simply placing additional requirements on local authorities, without a requisite increase in the resources available to them, means that care leavers will not reap the full benefits of the Bill, and will still face barriers to opportunity that other young people do not. We urge the Government to consider the additional funding or resources local authorities will require to ensure that they can meet their statutory requirements in full.

Schools – the national curriculum

Although financial education became part of the national curriculum for secondary schools in England in 2014, a combination of the fact that many schools are not currently required to follow that curriculum and a lack of subject expertise, time and resources devoted to delivering money lessons means that many pupils continue to leave school without receiving any. A research study MyBnk commissioned alongside Compare the Market in 2023 [3] found that fewer than four-in-ten young people recall receiving any financial education lessons during their schooling. Though financial education does appear on the curriculum, it is not sufficiently enforced or resourced to ensure that all children receive lessons of this kind.

Therefore, MyBnk supports the requirement within this Bill for all schools to teach the national curriculum. We now want the Government to use the Bill, alongside the Curriculum & Assessment Review, to mandate a minimum of 30 hours annually of comprehensive financial education for all pupils aged 11-18-years-old, while ensuring the integration of this across educational pathways.

January 2025