Financial Education Should Not Be a Postcode Lottery: A Conversation With Sarah Marks.

Published: 2025 | From the Making It Matter podcast

For the first episode of the Making It Matter podcast, I spoke with Sarah Marks, CEO of RedSTART Educate — a financial education and social mobility charity working with primary school children in communities of greater disadvantage across England, Scotland, and Wales.

I have volunteered with RedSTART myself, working with children on the value of money, spending and saving, and even tax (trickier than you might think with a room of nine-year-olds). But this conversation took me much deeper into why the work exists, what it has proven so far, and what it would take for financial education to stop being something children receive by luck.

Sarah's story, and her argument, deserve a wide audience. Here is what stayed with me.

A financial strategy of “just work harder”

Sarah spent her career in asset management before moving into the charity sector — she was global head of client service at an asset management firm when she first encountered RedSTART, as a volunteer using her company's volunteering days.

What struck me most was her honesty about her own financial life. For most of her career, her financial strategy amounted to working hard and not regularly spending more than she earned. No investment strategy. No real plan. As she approached the later stages of her career, she realised she was worse off financially than she could and should have been — not through recklessness, but because nobody had ever equipped her with the knowledge.

And then came the realisation that drives her work now: the guardrails that protected previous generations — defined benefit pensions, a reliable state pension — have largely fallen away. A generation is growing up with no financial education and none of those protections. As Sarah put it, we are heading toward a society where large numbers of elderly people will not be able to live effectively, particularly as more people rent privately for life — a manageable situation when you are young and working, a precarious one when you are older and facing a rent rise or a notice to leave.

Education and information give people optionality. It is then their choice whether to follow a certain path. But if you never show them the path, you have not given them a chance.

What RedSTART actually does — and why “little and often” matters

RedSTART works only with primary schools serving communities of greater disadvantage — schools at level five or below on the Index of Multiple Deprivation. Under its Change the Game strategy, the charity sees the same children every year from Reception through to Year 6, rather than delivering a single one-off workshop.

That design decision came directly from Sarah's early observations. When she took over as CEO, RedSTART was delivering one four-hour workshop to any school that wanted it, for children anywhere from eight to thirteen. The children enjoyed it — but she could not convince herself that one session, however good, would genuinely change behaviour. Research from the University of Cambridge shows that children's spending and saving habits are formed by the age of seven — which means intervention has to start early and be sustained.

The programme is built on the pedagogy of little and often: younger children learn and retain information better when it is delivered in small, repeated, bite-sized pieces over time. A ladder of learning runs from Reception to Year 6, covering good money habits, confidence with financial terminology, familiarity with bank accounts — and, notably, how to think about work and life.

That last part surprised me. RedSTART talks to children about finding work that gives them energy rather than drains them — the idea that if 75 to 80% of your job plays to what energises you, you are likely to be both happier and more successful. With an estimated 25% of current jobs unlikely to exist in ten years, they are preparing children for portfolio careers, resilience, and choice — not just budgeting.

The evidence: a randomised control trial

What sets RedSTART apart in this sector is the rigour of its evidence-building. The charity commissioned the Policy Institute at King's College London to run a longitudinal randomised control trial — the largest ever carried out on the impact of primary school financial education — following thousands of children through school, comparing those receiving the programme against control schools.

The most recent results showed a positive medium-sized impact on treatment children versus control children, particularly on financial knowledge and ability — with attitudinal shifts expected to follow. Two member schools have had Ofsted inspections that specifically recognised the programme's contribution, resulting in higher ratings in their PSHE assessments.

And then there are the stories the data cannot capture. Sarah told me about a parent who emailed the charity because her daughter — two years into the programme — had come home asking her parents to open a savings account for her. The parent did not know how, and asked RedSTART for help. One workshop had travelled home, started a family conversation, and prompted action. Who knows where that path leads for that little girl.

Teachers are noticing too. Those receiving children who have had two years of the programme report a visible difference in how those children talk about money, saving, and budgeting compared to cohorts before the programme existed. And the strongest signal of all: most of RedSTART's growth — from 93 member schools to a projected 150 — has come from teachers recommending it to other teachers, or taking it with them when they move schools.

The policy gap: why England lags

One of the most useful parts of our conversation was Sarah's clear-eyed explanation of the policy landscape.

In Scotland and Wales, financial education is on the curriculum for both primary and secondary — but that has created its own problem: governments have concluded the job is done. In practice, the curriculum points teachers to guidelines and portals from which they can build their own lesson plans. But teachers in the schools RedSTART serves have roughly four minutes of planning time per lesson. The materials exist; the capacity to use them does not. RedSTART fills that gap with ready-made kit bags, lesson plans, a twenty-minute training video, and hands-on support in the first year.

In England, the situation is weaker still: financial education is referenced within maths but is not compulsory, not clearly defined, and the growth of academy trusts means more schools sit outside direct curriculum alignment than within it. Sarah's asks are specific: clarity about exactly what schools are expected to deliver, and measurement — because schools respond to what Ofsted assesses.

The argument that should end the debate

Two of Sarah's arguments have stayed with me since we spoke, and I think they deserve to be quoted widely.

The first is the reading analogy. Imagine saying to schools: we know learning to read is important, but we will not pay for it — instead, publishers will fund charities to come in and teach your children to read, because publishers are the ultimate beneficiaries. Everyone would be up in arms. Yet that is precisely the current model for financial education: government declares it important, provides no funding, and the financial services industry pays for charities to fill the gap. The benefits of a financially capable population do not accrue to financial services alone — they accrue to the NHS, the benefits system, the whole economy.

The second is the PE precedent. When government decided PE in primary schools mattered, it recognised that primary teachers teach everything and could not all teach PE confidently — so it created a fund of tens of millions of pounds, still in place today, that schools can draw on to bring in external providers to train teachers. Sarah's question is simple: if we think PE is worth that, is financial education not at least as important? The mechanism already exists. It has a precedent. It just needs the will.

And doing nothing is not a free lunch. Research from the Institute of Psychiatrists found that 50% of people in financial difficulty reported very poor mental health. We currently spend nothing up front on teaching children about money, and tens of millions on the consequences of not teaching them. The cost is just hidden.

Invisible money and what parents can do

One exchange in this conversation has genuinely changed how I think about financial education design. Sarah described asking children where money is kept. One child answered: on your phone.

From that child's point of view, that is exactly where money is. It is what they see their parents use to pay for everything. Money has become invisible — no dinner money, no coins, no cash in a purse offering a physical signal of how much is left in the week. The budgeting feedback loop that previous generations absorbed by handling money has quietly disappeared, and the tap-to-pay economy is built precisely on that frictionlessness.

Sarah's advice for parents is disarmingly simple: talk about money at home. When you tap your phone in a shop, explain what just happened — where that money came from, what it means. Make the invisible visible again. And teach the three buckets: spend-now money, short-term savings, and long-term savings — because even a small amount in that last bucket, given enough time, grows into something much bigger.

Primary-age children are still influenced most by home. Once they reach secondary school, peers take over. The window for building strong money habits — muscle memory that can withstand the pressures to come — is early, and it is short.

What success means

I ended, as I always will on this podcast, by asking Sarah what making it matter means to her.

Her answer: every child having a crack at life and a fair start. A level playing field. We squander the potential of so many young people by writing them off and giving them less support simply because of the postcode they happen to be born into. Who knows what some of these children could have become in a different environment, with different support and different opportunities.

That is not something any single charity can fix. But every step toward it, as Sarah said, has to be good for everybody in the country.

A note on what happened next

Since this conversation was recorded, RedSTART merged with Money Ready in September 2025, combining forces to deliver financial education from ages 4 to 40 across the UK, with Sarah Marks taking on a strategic leadership role in Money Ready's Programme and Delivery Directorate. The Change the Game programme — and the King's College London research underpinning it — continues with greater reach. A fitting next chapter for a leader whose stated measure of success was always to make her own charity unnecessary.

Watch the full conversation on YouTube.