On September 16 2009 the Company of Educators held one of its evening discussion meetings for Freemen looking at different aspects of education. The subject was Personal Financial Education and the seminar was led by Wendy van den Hende who is the Chief Executive of the Personal Financial Education Group (PFEG). Peter Briggs, as the new Chair of Education Committee, opened the evening and welcomed the speaker.

PFEG is a charity which was established formally in 2000. It has a mission 'for all young people to leave school with the confidence, the skills and the knowledge in financial matters so that they can take part fully in society'. When it started in 2000 there were 2 staff and there are now 58 with a head office in London and five regional offices. Significant funding has come in recent years from the Government through the Financial Services Authority (FSA) and the Department for Children Schools and Families (DCSF). The transfer of Ed Balls from Economic Secretary in the Treasury to Secretary of State for the DCSF accelerated the rate of progress. Support has come from different parts of the financial services industry including professional bodies such as the Institute for Chartered Accountants in England and Wales.

The work is through teachers rather than the delivery of the material themselves. There is a Website www.pfeg.org which is used across the world. Schools are helped to plan and deliver lessons in personal financial education. This is not a statutory part of the curriculum although secondary schools in England are encouraged to include this as part of the 2007 curriculum in personal, social, health and economic education. There is now a recommendation that this should be made compulsory and form part of the mathematics and citizenship curriculum as well. The Rose report in April 2009 recommended a revised primary school curriculum with financial capacity included as a theme. The personal financial education theme also fits in with the 'Every Child Matters' approach as one of the five themes there is achieving economic well-being.

There are five main aspects to PFEG's approach:

There are other approaches apart from the PFEG approach such as the work in Tower Hamlets, Hackney and Islington where volunteers go into schools for special days on financial literacy. Our Company is involved with this through the Livery Skills Link and the Lord Mayor's initiative in 2008-9.

PFEG has supported 3,500 schools over the past 3 years. A new initiative was funded by the DCSF called 'My Money week' and in June 2009 when it was first held 12,000 teachers ordered the toolkits for work in 8,000 schools. The aim has been to get into 10% of primary schools and 20% of secondary schools and in fact the percentages achieved have been over 30% in primary and over 50% in secondary schools.

It is a difficult question to judge whether the intervention with pupils on personal financial education has worked. One key issue is whether the students will go on to make better decisions financially in ten or more years' time. There has been evaluation of the PFEG work by bodies such as the National Foundation for Education Research (NFER). It has been shown that results in Mathematics can improve where students have been part of a financial literacy programme. The FSA did a baseline survey in 2006 on levels of financial literacy and it is hoped that improvements will be demonstrated over time.

There have been many achievements for PFEG over recent years but the future is uncertain. There will be a general Election in 2010 and the current funding for PFEG finishes in 2011. They are looking for £8million pounds in 2011 to continue the work as they are already at the point where the demand by teachers is proving difficult to meet.

The discussion covered a number of points.

The meeting concluded with a vote of thanks from the Chair to Wendy van den Hende.