Starting the conversation: How collaboration helps overcome barriers to talking about money in the classroom.
Teaching children about money isn’t always easy. Schools often face barriers — from lack of resources to the complexity of real-life financial challenges. In this article, Paul Street, former headteacher and now part of the Just Finance Foundation (JFF) education team, explores how collaboration with local organisations and community partners can break down those barriers. Drawing on JFF’s work as the UK’s financial literacy charity, Paul shows why partnerships make financial education more effective and relevant for every classroom.
The phrase ‘a problem shared is a problem halved’ might not be strictly true all the time, however, it’s certainly something to bear in mind when considering developing a full financial education strategy for the area you find yourself working in.
At JFF we often find ourselves working with individual schools who have the drive to make that extra bit of difference to the lives and learning of their children with regards to financial education. In addition, we aim to work with larger groups or areas to help to develop a wider financial education strategy. It’s when a variety of groups come together like this that we can really start to see wide ranging impact.
In Nottingham, we have been working with the Financial Resilience Partnership for a number of years now. The partnership looks at developing financial resilience across a wide range of needs within the city, and partners include debt advice, homelessness services, church action groups, community groups, housing, local political support from councillors, significant partners in industry, university input, wider groups such as the Money and Pensions Service, gambling charities, refugee support, and many more. In fact, more than 25 organisations make up the partnership.
The advantages to having such a huge pool of specialist and local knowledge are clear:
Specific specialised knowledge: We might not have all the in-depth understanding of a particular problem outside of our own field of expertise, however, working in partnership means that we can easily ask for advice when needed. For JFF, this has led to excellent opportunities to further develop our offer for schools. We have partnered with GamCare, a gambling harm support charity, to develop great resources for younger children in schools to learn more about the potential for gambling harms. We have also worked with the Stop Loan Sharks Project to better understand their work and how we can help children learn more about unregulated borrowing.
Localised knowledge: Developing relationships with local community groups has helped us to think about what we can offer in a specific area. This helps us enormously when talking to schools as we find ourselves with a greater understanding of the specific challenges faced by people within a particular catchment.
Signposting: In understanding what local groups and charities are doing to help the area, we are able to talk to schools and suggest other people they could work with. We’ve been able to signpost schools to inviting in the Stop Loan Sharks team to talk to the children, or, to get in touch with a particular local community group if there is a need to put families in touch with the help and assistance they might need.
Having a sense of the bigger picture: Being a part of a city wide group has enabled everyone involved to see how their own particular cog fits in to the wider development of positive financial mindsets across the area.
Opportunities to spread the word: Working with local authorities through the partnership led to JFF becoming involved in the city wide healthy schools presentation day. Giving us access to many schools and a platform to showcase the work we do and how we can help schools to develop more financial education.
Learning: Talking to others, about the challenges faced by all sorts of people of all ages, helps us to understand more about the work we do ourselves, about where our priorities should be and about what we might need to do next in order to improve the work we do.
The recent APPG report into financial education referenced the work of this particular partnership, saying … ‘This network shows the potential for place-based approaches to use expertise of the needs of an area, coordinate resource across a range of sectors to support schools and leverage local authority support to connect more effectively with schools.’
This is an example of a wide reaching partnership, however we do find partnership works really well on a smaller level too. We actively seek to become a part of network groups, bringing together groups of schools within an area or with a similar focus. We work with PSHE networks, healthy schools networks, church school groups etc. The main point within all this is to enable conversation and collaboration.
Financial education can be seen as something offered to children as a part of the curriculum. This is great and will undoubtedly help to strengthen the financial futures of the children involved. For those schools interested in being a part of something wider, collaboration with other local groups can help to ground their work firmly within the needs of their local community, help to pass on their expertise to others within the area and give them access to other forms of support – for their children, their parents and, potentially, for their staff. We should never underestimate the power of collaboration, especially in an area of such importance in our lives.
Paul Street
Financial Education Delivery Coordinator at the Just Finance Foundation, Paul supports the development of the LifeSavers programme and contributes to in-depth research and case studies with schools to help elevate our work. He brings over 30 years’ experience in primary education as a teacher, local authority mathematics adviser and headteacher, and is passionate about improving children’s life chances through financial education.