Have you had your Financial Five a Day?

Challenges around financial literacy, financial competency and financial confidence are unfortunately a well-established feature of current UK society. With the Financial Conduct Authority finding that half the population has low confidence in making decisions to do with money, and that groups with the least financial competencies include those on lower incomes, young people, women, and minorities.

These challenges around money management have only been intensified by the cost-of-living crisis due to contemporary inflation, rising interest rates and ongoing geo-political crises. Furthermore, these challenges interact with already existing societal inequalities based on gender, class, ethnicity, demography and so on. Financial decisions in any walk of life can have a great impact, but particularly for those in these disadvantaged groups, they can be disastrous.

Finances in the classroom

Not every child will have parents who are able to provide them with the financial skills needed to effectively manage money or understand loans, mortgage, pensions, taxes or investments. Many people have called for schools and Further and Higher Education establishments to include budgeting and other money management skills into learning, however in England, Ireland and Wales, no changes to curriculum have yet been forthcoming. The situation in Scotland is slightly different, where the government have begun to include elements of financial literacy in maths and social subjects. This appears to be having a positive impact with the Government reporting that Scottish students have the highest levels of financial competency in the UK.

With this current gap in financial education, people are turning to alternative sources such a social media for their financial advice. Although much of the material is well intentioned, it is blanket advice that is often not tailored to individual situations and is therefore potentially not the best advice for the viewer. In some situations, it could even be harmful to follow for individuals in certain situations.

The F5D (Financial Five a Day) Project

Professor George Callaghan and Dr Martin Higginson from The Open University's Faculty of Arts and Social Sciences aspire to address this issue by creating and providing materials to support financial literacy and to improve financial wellbeing. The outputs will individually and collectively nudge people towards having positive money conversations and developing strategies to take more control of household finances.

Much as “5 fruit and veg a day” has raised awareness and stimulated action in relation to public health by offering an easy way to monitor and increase healthy food consumption, the F5d project will raise awareness and stimulate action around financial wellness.

The intention of the project is to develop a high level “Financial Five a Day” framework which can be flexibly applied to different sections of society. For example, one area of F5d might focus on “grow money knowledge”. For an older demographic this might involve learning about pension drawdown, whereas for young adults it might be working out mortgage affordability.

The potential to have flexibility of the F5d framework to support different groups also opens the possibility of including sections of society with different money beliefs. For example, those following the principles of Sharia finance may well have a unique response to F5d prompts as those engaging hold a different belief system around loans and interests.

Professor Callaghan said of the project, “The component elements of Financial Five a Day will be developed through primary research involving workshops, focus groups and interviews. Reflecting the project’s aims of inclusivity, experts will be drawn from consumer rights groups, poverty groups, commercial financial institutions, academia – including Economics and Psychology – and financial coaches. It is likely to include a mix of practical topics such as spending decisions and affordability, as well as money behaviours and emotions such as money goals, money choices and money attitude.

“This process will co-create a road map of materials in the form of toolkits and other outputs that will deliver the financial five a day. Depending on feedback and viability, these will be delivered in sequential order, starting with those where we have the greatest in-house capacity to fulfil and progressing to outputs which will require partner funding. These include podcasts, a website – containing tools, blogs, guidance and more, print output and journal entries, an interactive app that contains a money decision tree, and a TV series with each programme dedicated to an element of Financial Five a Day. Alongside this, the project will work up a marketing strategy to maximise audience reach and contribute to improving money knowledge, money attitudes and money behaviours.”