Teach Parents to Teach Children About Money

Teach Parents to Teach Children About Money.

A new scheme has been launched with the Money Advice Service (MAS) working in partnership with the Big Lottery Fund (Wales) to coach parents to teach their children about money. The pilot scheme is being run by a number of local authorities in Wales and is expected to reach around 1,000 parents and 1,600 children below the age of 11.

The scheme is called "Talk, Learn, Do: Parents, Kids and Money" and will cost around £400,000. The Money Advice Service is regularly seen on television promoting basic money awareness and is not funded by the government but is funded by levy on the financial services industry. MAS has been criticised over the last few years for excessive spending budgets and having little impact in helping those who are unable to afford financial advice. The Treasury Select Committee is already reviewing an MAS and its impact.

The overall goal of the scheme is to give parents a skill set to be able to educate their children about money and having a sensible approach to their finances in preparation for their own future by helping with budgeting and longer term financial goals.

Comment

We believe the goal to educate children about their money is a good one and we have campaigned for the last 15 years for better financial education in schools.

Whilst we believe the objective is therefore laudable, £400,000 with a reach of just 1000 parents is, in our opinion, a staggering waste of money. This equates to £400 per parent or potentially £800 per couple. We believe this money would be better spent training one teacher in 1,000 schools i.e. the same outreach of 1,000 people but then those 1,000 teachers with the skills set could reach out to hundreds of thousands of children. We are not fans of MAS and with this disjointed thought process delivering very little for significant costs, we never will be.

We have also suggested to the Treasury in the past as well as the financial services regulator that perhaps the £300 million plus MAS budget would be better spent on financial education in schools or alternatively to establish a "Money Advice Aid Scheme" similar to the legal aid scheme where people who cannot afford financial advice or are in financial difficulty are able to have say a one or two hour full consultation with a Chartered Financial Planner with a funding certificate to pay for that advice time at say £100 per person. Even just with a budget of £400,000 that would mean 4,000 people have access to highly qualified advice rather than the "blind leading the blind" or indeed with an annual budget of £81 million plus that equates to 81,000 financial advice meetings for the less well off with a highly qualified adviser.