The Personal Finance Society has launched a website to support its ‘My Personal Finance Skills’ pro-bono financial awareness programme.

The website will give young people a chance to learn money management skills while unable to access school.

The website features four, free 25 minute online sessions covering staying safe from scams, moving on from school, future finance and how to make financial decisions.

The sessions are available on demand via www.mypersonalfinanceskills.org/ and are designed for students aged 14 to 18.

The material has been awarded the Financial Education Quality Mark by Young Money, the PFS says. 

The workshops are based on the Financial Education Planning framework and complement financial education provision for students in their teens.

Before the outbreak, the PFS’s My Personal Finance Skills was set to double the number of sessions for students across the UK this academic year but the lockdown halted this.

More than 900 PFS members have signed up to be ambassadors for the programme which delivers financial education workshops to schools across the UK utilising ‘gamification’ to support active engagement.

In the current academic year, more than 400 workshops were delivered to 12,000 students before the Coronavirus outbreak resulted in the closure of schools.

In the current academic year more than 500 sessions were due to take place but these have been rescheduled for later in the year with schools being given the option of whether they would like virtual workshops instead. The PFS says it hopes the new online sessions will complement face-to-face workshops when schools reopen.

Keith Richards, chief executive of the Personal Finance Society, said: “We launched My Personal Finance Skills as a pro-bono programme allowing members to demonstrate the profession’s wider commitment to financial awareness and education by serving the wider community they operate in.

“While in-school workshops are currently on hold due to the ongoing Covid-19 outbreak, the Personal Finance Society has adapted our in-school material to offer students free online financial education.”

“This new consumer-facing website has the potential to expand to incorporate wider information and guidance.”