King's College London

A good knowledge of finances is key to adult life, yet many young people are not receiving the education they need to build this knowledge. Although two thirds of teachers say their school is delivering some form of financial education, only 1% think their pupils’ knowledge of the subject is adequate.

A key challenge to delivering good financial education is the lack of time, resources and confidence among teachers to teach it. Although a vast array of materials exists to support the teaching of financial education, there is a lack of high quality evaluation to help schools determine whether these programmes actually support their pupils’ learning.

Since 2022, the Policy Institute has been working with RedSTART Educate to bridge this gap. We have recently published the report from the second year of the project, along with an updated report from the first year. Both reports can be found on our project page.

The second year report provides findings from the second year of implementation of our randomised controlled trial of RedSTART’s Change the Game financial education programme for primary schools. We find that Year 4 pupils in schools that have been allocated to receive Change the Game in Year 3 and Year 4 have significantly higher financial knowledge than those in schools that were allocated to the control. These gains have been sustained from the first year of the project.

We also found that pupils in treated schools had significantly higher scores on financial ability, mindset and connections; however, there was no difference on financial behaviours, maths ability or maths attainment.

These findings are consistent with – possibly even more positive than – the body of research on financial education. A recent meta-analysis found that the average effect size across 18 randomised experiments was 0.15 standard deviations, while for Change the Game it was 0.31 standard deviations.

However, the lack of impact on some measures highlights the importance of continuing to follow this cohort, to understand whether improvements to these ‘harder’ measures accrue over the full course of Change the Game.

The updated first year report now includes analysis broken down by demographics, and suggests that the benefits of Change the Game are fairly uniform across demographic groups, with similar impacts by gender, ethnicity and free school meal status.

Overall, we find that:

• Children in Year 3 and 4 can engage meaningfully with financial education and can benefit from interventions that aim to improve their financial knowledge. In particular, our findings indicate that game-based activities can improve pupils’ understanding of financial concepts and develop their understanding of money and its role in society.
• Consistent interventions are necessary to maintain learning gains, especially when interventions are relatively low intensity.
• External organisations seeking to deliver programmes in schools should prioritise reducing burden for teaching and leadership staff as far as possible. Because of the wide range of competing priorities on staff and pupil time, buy-in among school staff is crucial to the successful delivery of school-based interventions.
• Accessible resources and varied activities, such as those used by RedSTART, are linked to more time-efficient interventions. Evidence gathered here suggests that lower intensity programmes can yield results that are comparable to higher intensity programmes.

The Year 4 pupils will be re-surveyed when they’re in Year 6 to understand the cumulative effect of Change the Game across four years of primary school. We also have two other cohorts: a cohort who were in Year 2 in 2022/23, who will be re-surveyed this year in Year 4 and then again in Year 6, and a cohort who were in Reception in 2023/24, who will be re-surveyed every two years until Year 6. Studying impact across these three cohorts will provide a robust estimate of the impact of a financial education programme such as Change the Game.