The Money and Pension Service (MaPS) Children and Young People’s Financial Wellbeing Survey is a nationally representative survey of children and young people aged 7 to 17 (and their parents/carers aged 18+) living in the UK. The findings from the survey play a major role in producing robust measures of children and young people’s financial wellbeing and capability across the UK.

Previous research has shown that financial wellbeing, by the time of reaching financial independence, is in large part a consequence of what is seen, learned, and experienced during childhood and adolescence.

In 2020, MaPS launched the UK Strategy for Financial Wellbeing 2020 – 2030, which is a ten-year framework to help achieve its vision. The Financial Foundations Agenda for Change, 1 of the 5 included in the UK Strategy, sets a national goal of 2 million more children and young people aged 5-17 receiving a meaningful financial education by 2030. This data product measures the progress against the national goal as the sector works towards the goal.

These data are anonymised microdata (individual survey responses) for the 2022 survey, and they are available on application through our service as a Safeguarded dataset. We additionally hold the 2019 version of the survey. Applicants who are interested in both versions can apply for these together through a single application here. If you are interested in the 2019 version of the survey only, please apply for this through the UK Data Service (UKDS).

Content

The survey answers are available as, for each year, two record-level CSVs (one with codes and one with labels) or as an SPSS file. There is also a code to label lookup file, a questionnaire copy and a technical report. If using the CSV version of the data, it is important to apply the weighting factor, to make the data representative of the UK of children and young people aged 7-17.

For an overview of the characteristics of a short number of the columns, see the Data Summary below. A Variable Dictionary is supplied to successful applicants with the data itself.

Quality, Representation and Bias

The survey is high-quality and organised by a professional surveying firm on behalf of MaPS. The survey includes quota/screening questions at the beginning to ensure a broadly representative sample of the population across the UK is included. Each respondent is assigned a weighting value which, when applied, should result in a survey that reflects the demographics of the UK children.

Special Stipulation: MaPS requires a disclaimer on publications using the data, that the publication does not necessarily represent its views. The following text is recommended: “Disclaimer: the views and recommendations in this report are those of the organisation publishing this report and its author(s) and do not necessarily represent those of the Money and Pensions Service whose data was used to produce it.”