1. Introducing our approach towards financial capability resources
December 2016
This presentation can be used as a foundation for your own; please feel free to add more slides and amend as you wish.

2. Our previous resources
The Citizens Advice financial capability resources were located on the Citizens Advice website, as part of the overall education resources.
They are intermingled with consumer education materials, and many of them have the Skilled to Go branding that they inherited from the Office of Fair Trading.
These materials – along with some internally facing materials on CABlink – comprised a total library of 53 resources. Some were smaller individual activities, others were longer session plans.
These resources were accessed by members who had submitted their details for the free registration. There were over 1,500 members, many from the regional financial capability forums across England and Wales.

3. The need to evolve our approach
The evolving direction of the One service strategy:
Increasingly financial capability is integrated into the advice we give.
A more flexible approach has shown a need for smaller, bite-size activities.
Greater scope for autonomy and innovation from the individual local offices.
Rather than trying to drum up interest in 60-minute financial capability sessions, many local offices found that they wanted support to make financial capability relevant to clients within the context of their own lives.
Often, this meant doing smaller activities, and picking individual resources that suited a client rather than a generic ‘off-the shelf’ session pack.

4. The new resources
The new financial capability resources were developed to address the evolving needs of the service, whilst building on the previous strengths of our resources.
The previous 53 resources have been wholly deconstructed, and revamped. Everything has been rebranded, reformatted, and reorganised. In addition, entire new areas of financial capability are now being covered.
There are now 170 new resources in total, which are themselves organised into 26 individual session packs.
There are also 9 pre-packaged toolkits of resources available (with more pending), that share the materials used in recent and innovative models of integrated financial capability across the network.
There is a section on supporting resources, including best-practice guides and glossaries. This section includes online interactive materials designed to complement more complex activities, and generic presentations – just like this one – for local offices to use when introducing new models, materials and approaches. It also includes a range of apps, tools and resources developed by local Citizens Advice.

5. Practical use Example –
The new financial capability resources are already arranged into session packs; these are ranked in terms of complexity, and occasionally in terms of whether or not a high level of numeracy is required.
However, for those advisers that want to take advantage of the more flexible structure of the new resources, they can download every single individual activity themselves. Whereas session packs are split into trainer notes and client handouts, individual activities are self-contained for ease of use.
Example –
You have only have thirty minutes to do some financial capability with a client who need some help understanding payslips and saving money on their energy bills.
The topic area jobs and employment contains a payslip exercise which can be downloaded in isolation. Next, the topic area energy and water contains a few activities on saving on energy costs. An advisor can browse through and pick what they choose, all in less than a minute.

6. A new type of lesson plan
If you prefer using pre-packaged sessions – or are able to offer lengthier sustained sessions to clients – the resources are arranged in session packs for ease of use. These are split into the trainers notes and client handouts, and are designed to be easily adaptable for both one-to-one and group sessions.
However, these sessions no longer have lesson plans in the normal fashion. Rather than imposing a fixed times and sequences of activities, we are allowing advisers to gauge what activities can be skipped if necessary, and which ones are most important in any given session.
Red sessions are essential, amber are optional, green are non-essential.
The size of the session circle indicates how long the activity takes in relative terms.

7. What else have we done? The new resources have:
Been updated and refreshed to incorporate over 215 changes based on constructive feedback.
Guidance for our new impact and evaluation tool - developed by Citizens Advice - has been integrated into all the session packs and toolkits, as well as being available separately.
All the resources have been mapped to the Adult Financial Capability Framework.
All resources have been mapped to the Citizens Advice PETRA recording codes
Included resources, tools and apps from 23 different local Citizens Advice across the network in England and Wales.

8. What happens next?
The new resources are an evolving, growing library.
We will continue to take feedback on board constantly to help develop and grow the resources.
We will continue to develop our award-winning Digital Money Coaching role.
All-new best practise guides will be launching soon.
We plan to increase and expand our ‘Energy and Water’ offer substantially.
The new suite of financial capability resources was originally ‘soft-launched’ in September This launch allowed us to pilot our new approach in a live and agile way.
Since then, we have developed a full suite of training to support local Citizens Advice, spread over 4 days and available to book on.
We have also developed a new and robust impact and evaluation tool specifically for financial capability.

9. For any further information or feedback, contact us at financial
For any further information or feedback, contact us at

10. The Financial Skills for Life team
Christy McAleese
Team manager
David Mahon
Forums / training & resources
Hannah Luck
Forums / communication & information
Also…
Basam Diablos
Financial capability development consultant
Basam is attached to the FSfL team, but also works across other teams and divisions equally.

11. Fill in your details here