Students trained to become Focus Group Leaders

Evaluating the impact of the DebtAware Money Management Programme on the children is an extremely important element of the whole programme.

At present we have a number of evaluation techniques in place, in order to measure the impact of the programme on children’s attitude towards money management. There are a number of quantitative techniques in place, such as end of lesson evaluation questions that children answer and we record their responses.

We are keen to have a qualitative measure and for that we are using Focus Groups. These will consist of between 4 and 6 children, who have received the lessons being interviewed, for about 40 minutes, by Focus Group Leaders. The Focus Group Leaders will them write up a report of the interviews. Initially there will be 12 schools taking part in the interviews.

Six students, aged 18-20 years of age, have been trained by Money Advice Service, to become Focus Group Leaders. In fact all of the students were former students at Southlands High School in Chorley, and they were involved in the programme from the very beginning, writing lessons and materials as well as delivering lessons to Primary Schools.

Really this is an interesting piece of research and hopefully, by the summer of 2016, we should have some useful findings from the interviews. The interviews will be undertaken three times a year these will be in December, April and July.