Today (1st September 2020) marks a significant and symbolic day for many of teenagers across the UK.

Today, the first few thousand teenagers will gain access to their Child Trust Fund, money which has been accruing interest for eighteen years. Child Trust Funds (CTFs) were a government scheme in which provided two £250 or £500 deposits (dependent on parental income) in a government approved bank or investment account for the child.

With the first set of children with Child Trust Funds due to turn 18 on 1st September, many teenagers are set to miss out on their Child Trust Fund money which has been accumulating interest for nearly two decades. HMRC estimates that over 700,000 of the Child Trust Fund accounts originally set up have been ‘lost’ or forgotten about, meaning a significant amount of the money provided by the government will remain unclaimed.

At the Just Finance Foundation, we are on a mission to:

1) Ensure everyone is reunited with the money in their CTF

2) Ensure that CTFs are used wisely in this difficult financial climate

We wanted to take a moment to write and update you on the work the Just Finance Foundation are doing to battle the Coronavirus. The Just Finance Foundation, like many other charities, have been quick to respond with support to people effected by the Coronavirus.

So what have we been doing?

What would you do if we gave you £15 right now?

Treat yourself? Save it for a rainy day? Invest it? Give it to a loved one?

What would you have done with £15 when you were younger?

Would this be any different?

LifeSavers, our financial education programme for primary school children (KS1 and KS2), is now in it’s 4th year of delivery. Growing year-on-year, the programme now has 120 registered schools and we at The Just Finance Foundation (founders of LifeSavers) have ambitious plans to grow this number further!

A £250,000 grant from Allchurches Trust will enable The Just Finance Foundation’s LifeSavers programme to provide financial education to thousands more primary school children, helping them to develop healthy money skills and habits at a key point in their lives.

More and more organisations, schools and businesses are discovering the power of adopting and articulating a set of core values.

If everyone in an organisation shares the same values, then their energies are all channelled in the same direction. For businesses, some studies suggest that effective corporate values can generate up to 30 percent of difference in performance

In the UK we are experiencing a period of uncertainty. With precarious incomes, ever-rising housing costs and unprecedented levels of indebtedness, distress, as a direct and indirect result of money, is epidemic across the UK. Currently, 11.5 million people in the UK have less than £100 in savings and nearly nine million of us are in serious debt (FinCap 2019). Yet money and personal finances can often be a taboo subject.  

Keely Flowers is a local teacher. She is also project manager of Ablewell Advice (Image copyright - Ablewell Advice)