Description of the programme

Launched by the Commonwealth Bank Foundation in 2007, StartSmart is the largest financial literacy programme delivered face to face. It was developed by leading specialists from across a range of disciplines, with content mapped to national and state/territory curricula. A team of facilitators works in partnership with school teachers in classrooms to provide free, interactive financial education workshops supplemented with online resources. Its aim is to help students make engaged and confident personal financial choices. Topics, depending on school year, include distinguishing needs from wants, budgeting, saving, earning, investing, spending and future planning. To date, it has reached more than 275,000 primary, secondary and vocational school students each year and aims to reach 1 million student by 2015.

The study

The evaluation was undertaken in partnership with the Australian Council for Educational Research (ACER). Its scope was the StartSmart programme and its aim was to measure the impact of the programme on financial literacy among primary (years 1-6) and secondary school (years 9-11) students. Survey data were collected from 274 primary school teachers and 196 secondary school teachers (representing a total of around 8000 students) before a StartSmart session and again 2-4 weeks after it. This measured changes in teachers’ observations of their students’ in relation to issues relevant to financial education. Interviews of some primary students and their teachers were also undertaken to explore personal experiences of the programme.

What are the outcomes?

The study used a logic model to identify four key impact measures for measurement at both school levels (primary and secondary). These were students’:

• Attitude towards financial concepts
• Level of financial knowledge
• Behavioural intention
• Confidence in managing their own finances.

Key findings

Based on the pre-post survey of teachers (274 primary and 196 secondary school teachers):

• Attitude towards financial concepts: a moderate to large positive effect for primary students (Cohen’s d effect size: 0.78); a moderate positive effect for secondary students (0.59).
• Level of financial knowledge: a large positive effect for primary (Cohen’s d: 0.85) and secondary (0.94) students.
• Behavioural intention: a large positive effect for primary students (Cohen’s d: 1.03); a moderate increase for secondary students (0.63).
• Confidence in managing their own finances: a moderate positive effect for primary (Cohen’s d: 0.42) and secondary (0.47) students.

Additional findings, which, expressed as percentages, combine teacher’s response categories of ‘to a moderate extent’ and ‘to a major extent’ in their observed improvements in students’ financial literacy, include:

• A 56% improvement in primary students’ understanding of the difference between needs and wants. They also had improved understanding of why money is important, where it comes from and how to set goals and more positive attitudes towards saving.
• A 32% improvement in secondary students’ knowledge about setting budgets. They also had increased positive attitudes, knowledge and confidence and increased understanding of superannuation schemes, budgeting and savings interest, and increased awareness of the benefits of financial literacy as a life skill.

Case studies of individual schools showed that:

• Primary school teachers interviewed were impressed with the programme and how it helped engage students. Students described how they had used their learning at home, including in relation to dividing spending money from saving money.
• Secondary school teachers interviewed valued the StartSmart resources and the incorporation of real life situations in particular. Students gave examples of how they intended to use their learning, including in relation to saving for different things.

The authors conclude that the results of the evaluation indicate that StartSmart is impacting positively on the financial literacy of Australia’s young people.

Points to consider

• • The authors note that half of secondary school teachers indicated that their students were learning business and commerce related subjects. This may have tended to overstate the impacts of the programme for these students.
  • There is no counterfactual or comparison group or more robust qualitative approach to test causality. Therefore, there are limits to how confident we can be that the intervention caused or contributed to the outcomes observed. The results are based on teacher report and there is the potential for the results to have been influenced by study effects such as expectancy effects among teachers, which will tend to overstate the positive impacts of the programme.
  • No indication of sampling method, response rates or representativeness of achieved sample coverage is given. It may be a census of the target population for the school years covered, but this is not clear if so.
  • Confidence intervals, p-values or other measures of error (assuming sample-based estimates) are not given.
  • Pre and post measurement values and score parameters (e.g. min, max) for Cohen’s d are not given. This makes it difficult to relate the practical significance of the effects.
• • The findings are likely to be of international interest, with lessons which are relevant to financial education programmes for students of similar ages in other more economically developed countries.

Full report

StartSmart impact report - full report