The Money House is a real flat in Greenwich, London where we deliver 5 days of training in money skills to young care leavers and supported housing residents

Our modules cover:

Living independently
Budgeting and income
Benefits and banking
Borrowing and being informed
Living beyond today

We use the flat to make the training as unlike school as possible and to create an interactive learning space where learners mix the theory and practice of independent living.

Learners who complete the course get 2 accredited qualifications in personal budgeting and group work.

Our progress against these outcomes is monitored by Ecorys the agency appointed by our funder, The Big Lottery.

More info about the Big Lottery financial confidence programme is at http://bit.ly/1nyTYyD

We have a small budget to arrange our own evaluations of our progress over and above the evaluation carried out by Ecorys. This presentation is a condensed version of our first such evaluation.

The evaluation consisted of 11 young people who had previously attended The Money House being interviewed about their experiences.

Interviews were carried out one to one and in groups

We also asked permission from each participant to get their current rent account details from their landlord. All agreed, of which more later!

The full evaluation is on PDF here http://bit.ly/1oxTzTk

The evaluation was carried out by David Moynihan of David Moynihan Consulting Ltd

Look him up here:

http://davidmoynihanconsultingltd.com/DMC_Ltd/Home.html

The 28 people who stayed on we call 'Money Champions' they help us produce videos to promote the project and act as focus groups if we are planning on changing the training.

Watch the videos Money Champions made for us here http://bit.ly/VnFKKv

Through their housing experience, both The Hyde Group and Royal Borough of Greenwich knew that 16-25 yr olds were the highest risk for tenancy failure because of poor financial decision making. It was important to us to make sure the age range of learners reflected this need.

A shocking figure which is the average of the declared incomes of the 11 interviewees

Generally young people said they felt the materials and the way in which they were delivered made the training interesting and engaging. We think this justifies the time and money we put in before training even started to develop the curriculum, train our trainers and run a pilot session.

We found that young people want as much information a possible telling them what to expect and so we have changed our joining information to try to improve this.

We kind of knew this already but the evaluation showed that the support workers working with our prospective attendees were the most important people to get on side if we wanted young people to turn up on day one. We've intensified our efforts with them.

Because attending The Money House is linked to young people's ability to move into their own tenancy some young people were afraid they could 'pass or fail' so we've softened this message in our communications

We asked young people what social media they used to communicate and the overwhelming response was whatsapp. It's free and that is the number one consideration for our clients. We will be getting an account and giving our number out to attendees from now on!

These figures are from the data we collect from every participant across the first year so the percentages are of the 107 attendees. The numbers were crunched as part of the evaluation.

We looked at Hyde tenancies in 12/13 and took a snapshot of arrears data for residents between 16 & 25 which showed us that the average arrears across that age group was £650

Seven landlords of the young people provided data to us on their rent accounts. The average arrears across those seven accounts was £78. Rent data is sensitive information and is difficult to obtain but we are working with Royal Borough of Greenwich to get a larger sample.

What was encouraging beyond the figures was what the landlords said about the behaviour of the young people. The ones who had had problems were in touch with their landlord quickly and worked through their issues to ensure a reduction in arrears.

The Hyde Group lead the project through our economic and social investment dept Hyde Plus and we are funded by the Big Lottery.

The project was designed by The Hyde Group and the Royal Borough of Greenwich with help from our delivery partners, Greenwich Citizens Advice Bureau and Meridian Money Advice. MyBnk, a specialist financial education and enterprise charity took our brief and produced an excellent curriculum and set of materials.

The training team are hosted and employed by Greenwich CAB and Meridian Money Advice