The results from an evaluation of the My Money Now programme, run by the National Youth Agency and evaluated by Policy&Practice has now  been published.

The My Money Now project, delivered by the National Youth Agency was initiated to help young people, aged 16-21 years, to improve their knowledge about financial matters and to help them make good decisions about finances in the future. To ensure that participants could benefit significantly from additional support, the project was designed to cater for young people who had started apprenticeships, had joined or been placed upon employability programmes and/or were still in full-time vocational education in school or college.

When completed, the programme delivered 61 training sessions to 591 young people; 34 sessions were led by peer educators and 27 were delivered by established trainers. Apprentices participated in the programme in 17 of the centres (n=208), in the remaining centres most participants were on employability or vocational training programmes and a very small minority in self-selected ‘open’ sessions. The training was delivered across England. The evaluation had two elements:

• Impact evaluation to examine how well received the programme had been by young people; whether they had garnered the skills and knowledge intended; and, if they felt that the acquisition of knowledge and ideas may change the way they thought about and managed money in the future.
• Process evaluation, to assess whether the NYAs preferred option of using ‘peer educators’ to deliver the My Money Now programme made a tangible difference in terms of: delivery of the curriculum; experience of participants; and the likelihood of changed attitudes and behaviour by participants.

The evaluation was designed to capture qualitative and quantitative data from a range of standpoints to ensure that robust analysis could be undertaken through the triangulation of data. These included:

• Collection of quantitative data using two survey questionnaires which were completed by all participants; at the start of training, and immediately after its completion.
• Assisting in the training of peer educators (and subsequently, 4 peer associates) in reflective practice and observational techniques, and to mentor peer educators before, during the process of undertaking the programme and at its end.
• Undertaking telephone interviews with up to 60 young people three weeks after they had been engaged in the programme so that they had an opportunity to: make a retrospective appraisal of the quality and efficacy of the training.

More evidence on financial capability is available on the Money Advice Service Evidence Hub which can be accessed here.

The full report by Tony Chapman and Stephanie Rich is available here. Money Advice Service My Money Now Evaluation Report