Last week the Joseph Rowntree Foundation released a report, Monitoring Poverty and Social Exclusion 2016, which revealed that more than seven million people in the UK are living in poverty, despite being part of a working family.
Among the identifiable factors behind these figures were the rising costs of private renting, stagnating wages and cuts to benefits, with Helen Barnard, head of analysis at the foundation saying that ‘the economy is not working for low-income families’.
As a financial education charity, we would offer another important factor – stubbornly low levels of financial literacy, which affect families from across every social stratum. The effects of this are all around us, from spiralling personal debt to falling savings levels. In the worst cases, it can lead to complete financial exclusion.
It is a fact of life that good consumers build a good economy, so in order to address these problems we believe there needs to be a complete overhaul of how our society approaches financial education, and a shift in emphasis in how it is perceived and provided through formal education.
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