Branding and education - two sides of the same coin?

Does it seem appropriate, ethical, worth paying to develop Marketing tools - Brands especially designed for School children?

Barclays’ Bank relationship with schools goes back several years, through initiatives such as its Money Skills programme and direct financial support for schools. The Bank recently launched a new scheme supported by UK Government. The scheme provides financing and resources that support the government’s recently established free school and academy system to the tune of £1.25m over the next three years. This is a programme which helps young people to build the skills, knowledge and confidence they need to manage their money more effectively.

Clearly, Barclays aims at boosting children’s financial management skills in an age of increasing debt dependency and also improve the quality of schools’ teaching resources.

Barclays Money Skills has been developed in partnership with leading UK charities and is delivered by specialist community workers and Barclays employees in a range of settings, including one-to-one sessions and group seminars. The programme tackles topics such as opening a bank account; budgeting, saving and spending; and gives practical guidance on what to do when something goes wrong.

The Bank's management has invested £15 million in this industry-leading initiative, and have recently announced new partnership projects with three leading youth charities - Action for Children, the National Skills Academy for Financial Services and the National Youth Agency - to help them reach one million people with the programme by 2012.

For example, attending higher education presents new financial challenges for many students, and the learning curve can be steep. Although students should be concentrating on their University work, many are preoccupied by concerns over money. Barclays Money Skills ‘weeks’ have been designed to give students an awareness of personal finance issues and to provide them with some tools to control their budget. By strengthening students’ financial skills, confidence and knowledge, Bank aims to reduce their financial stress and increase their chances of achieving their education goals. In 2011, 150 colleges and 90,000 students participated in Barclays Money Skills weeks, through a partnership scheme with the National Skills Academy for Financial Services. The learning weeks engage young people in money management issues, through events and tutorials at their local college, to develop their financial knowledge and skills. Barclays employees play an important role, by helping facilitate the sessions and by sharing their professional expertise in the tutorials and workshops, as well as talking about their experiences with students interested in a career in the finance industry.

Luke Jooste, education sector Bank head explains: "Barclays spent time with recognised experts from the sector to understand whether we could support education on a broader scale. Through those discussions, it became clear that Barclays’ people, capabilities and scale in the UK were well placed to support some of the needs of the schools involved, so we put together a proposal that we took to the secretary of state-which is largely what we have now launched". Jooste insists Barclays’ increased involvement comes from an educational, rather than a brand marketing need. “This is a Department for Education initiative, not a Barclay’s initiative. We have found the right way for us to support the educational reform movement and we are happy to have found a way to contribute that the schools told us would be highly valuable. But this only works if it is led by the government. We have absolutely no intention of using this as an opportunity to promote Barclays,” he claims.

The National Union of Teachers in UK still has reservations about brand involvement, but Jooste is insistent that all control remains with the frontline educators. “Nothing from this programme will be put to use unless the administration of a particular school is comfortable that it will be beneficial to their pupils,” he says. “The relevant administrators and teachers will determine the precise execution at any given school, so there is no chance that the educational integrity of what those schools are doing could be compromised.”

The return on investment for Barclays is clearly a long-term strategy, with any immediate benefits being largely in the CSR domain. The bank has in place a number of soft metrics in the short term to determine the project’s success, including the amount of material downloaded to support in-class learning and the number of schoolchildren who acquire money-management skills. Jooste adds: “Over the long term, of course, we will be looking for signs that the schools and students we have supported through this initiative achieve more as a result of our engagement. That will, of course, be difficult to prove analytically, but we will watch for even qualitative signs.”

Is that a challenging idea for Banking organizations and education publics?
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