It has been rolled out in educational centres that voluntarily decide to participate in this initiative and to impart financial education. Indeed, some 500 centres each year throughout Spain have taken part. The participant centres have educational material provided by the Plan itself, through the Gepeese portal, so they may be used by teachers according to their own criteria and programmes. Complementing this is specific training for teachers, who are provided with supplementary educational resources (such as games and workshops). There is also an annual competition for participating pupils. In fact, on 1 October 2018 I had the opportunity to congratulate the winners of this competition from a school in Plasencia. In order to gauge the impact of this school programme, inform society of it and seek to continually improve it, an exhaustive evaluation of the programme was conducted in the 2014-2015 academic year.9 The evaluation of the short-term impact of the programme showed that:           Pupils following the financial education course obtained better results in financial literacy tests at the end of the year than pupils who did not. In terms of theme-based content, it was found that the financial education course especially increased pupils’ knowledge in “bank relations” (e.g. opening and closing bank accounts, the consequences of an overdraft and knowledge of bank fees, along with the notion of interest rates and their calculation). The impact of the course was less evident on matters such as saving, means of payment and responsible consumption.
The Survey is a very extensive study in which over 8,000 people were interviewed and asked – among other issues – about their financial knowledge; their holding and acquiring of saving, credit and insurance products; their work-related expectations; and their attitudes to consumption and saving. It is the most comprehensive, representative and internationally comparable information source available on Spanish citizens’ financial competences. 3/8  It is, therefore, a most useful survey. And it is novel regarding the additional information it provides on the social and economic context in which Spaniards take their financial decisions. In this connection, it measures competences which, without being strictly financial, can indeed affect peoples’ decisions, such as their degree of reading comprehension and their ability to understand specific graphics. The Survey thus provides us with a sound database for assessing our efforts to increase financial literacy. I encourage you, as specialists in this area, to exploit it by using both its aggregate findings and its microdata, which are available for research on the Banco de España’s Internet portal.1 With regard to the population’s financial knowledge, the Survey shows that an extensive group of Spaniards are not familiar with basic concepts such as inflation, interest rates or risk diversification. To answer correctly the question on inflation in the Survey requires understanding that an amount of money loses purchasing power when prices rise. 42% of interviewees are not able to answer this question correctly.