NatWest MoneySense, our free financial education programme, transformed its offering throughout the changing educational landscape in 2020. From using our social media platforms to deliver live lessons, to modifying our workshops to virtual delivery, we ensured our programme remained agile so students could continue learning about money during lockdown. Despite the school closures, in 2020 MoneySense reached more pupils than ever; we helped over 1.4 million young people learn about money, and our website had 261% more users than in 2019. We also launched Island Saver, the world’s first financial education video game, which has over 2.5 million downloads so far. With the return to lockdown in January, we recognised the need to continue adapting our resources to support young people with remote learning. Our latest offerings have made financial education even more flexible, including remote workshops, new remote learning bundles and exciting new Challenges.
Last year, we adapted our full suite of MoneySense workshops to digital delivery so young people could continue to be financially educated in the classroom with the virtual presence of a bank volunteer. These digital workshops proved successful, with over 300 taking place between September and December. To support teachers with remote teaching we further adapted two of these workshops to be delivered remotely: ‘How we use money’ for 5-8s and ‘Save our pennies, save our planet’ for 8-12s. These workshops can now take place over video call with their resources available on mymoneysense.com, making MoneySense more accessible than ever.
Our remote learning bundles for primary students supported numerous teachers throughout lockdown, with over 16,700 resources downloaded last year. These bundles provide ready-packaged lesson plans for teachers, containing materials that can be sent home to pupils. Earlier this year we expanded our bundle offering and curated packs for secondary students on two new topics: making good financial choices for 12-16s and the relationship between education, jobs, and income for 16-18s. These resources support teachers in approaching challenging money topics with secondary students, helping them to improve their financial understanding whilst learning at home.
With the return to remote teaching, we recognised that parents were once more in need of extra support to aid their child’s learning. We launched our new MoneySense Challenges – fun money missions that teach children about key money topics, while encouraging independent learning when parents need it most. These Challenges set exciting tasks within four core themes, exploring spending, savings, money safety and budgeting. The Challenges contain easy to follow progress charts with ‘checkpoints’ to mark the completion of each task, making it simpler than ever for parents to support their children with independent financial education.
Elaine Farrer, Financial Capability Programme Manager
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