Fair Education Alliance

Understandably, the Curriculum and Assessment Review has been the subject of much discussion since it was announced in July. Last week we submitted our joint response to the call for evidence, with 60 FEA members actively participating in the process. To develop a joint submission, we set out two clear principles from the beginning: ✅ We add value to the government’s review by presenting the points of consensus (avoiding a list of asks specific to a particular organisation).  ✅ We ensure the views of education institutions, businesses and non-profit organisations are reviewed by those in other sectors. We brought FEA members together in a series of large meetings which were designed to share ideas and provide feedback, and sub-group meetings which were designed to draft specific responses. Naturally, there was disagreement; with members sometimes coming from apparently opposite ends of the spectrum. By creating time and space for members to have dialogue, everyone involved developed their thinking and it provided nuance to our response, which ultimately strengthened it. 🚀 The Fair Education Alliance submission  Overall, our submission focused on improving the curriculum and assessment for children and young people from low-income households. We looked at this through the lens of social justice and inclusion. Some of the key themes were: 1️⃣ Reducing the amount of curriculum content:  Much of the current curriculum structure and content is high quality and worth keeping, but overall, it is too full. This means pupils who are struggling don’t have time to fully master concepts and teachers don’t have the flexibility to reinforce learning through projects or experiences. This can also pose barriers for learners with SEN. 2️⃣ Developing essential skills for the future: Young people from low-income households have fewer opportunities to develop their essential skills and report lower levels of these skills which contributes to far higher levels of youth unemployment for these young people. While subject knowledge is fundamental, our curriculum should build these essential skills in a structured and sequential way, both through subject teaching and enrichment activities. 3️⃣ Diversifying the curriculum : We have a lack of racially and socioeconomically diverse thinkers included across subjects. The sources and traditions the curriculum draws on in each subject need to be broader and more diverse, so that children are getting a rich and nuanced perspective on each subject, and every child can see themselves represented in the curriculum. 4️⃣ Foundational numeracy and literacy: We must support every learner to develop foundational numeracy and literacy skills, even if they don’t attain a grade 4 in their English and maths GCSE at age 16. Read Jane’s blog for more on the Curriculum and Assessment Review - link in comments. 🔗

I feel seen 👀 The Bridgespan Group research indicates a key truth: If you want to drive equitable systems change, investing in system orchestrators is among the highest-leverage investments that the philanthropic sector can make.” Thanks Stanford Social Innovation Review. I, and so many others, believe that collaboration is key to achieving and sustaining improved outcomes for children and young people. That’s why we embrace the ‘messy’ work to unite diverse perspectives, build meaningful, cross-sector relationships, shift power to young people and nurture innovation. But, we’ve seen that the appetite for funding this is low in the UK. We’re so grateful to those who have come on board to support us over over the past ten years – your work enabling and as part of the collective is huge. As we’ve grown from 25 to 300 member organisations, it’s crucial to *power-up the orchestration*. If you want to invest in shifting the conditions that keep that problems in place, please do reach out. We’re looking for funding partners to join the movement and make sure all children and young people can thrive and succeed. We’d love to explore collaboration and make change happen together. "In a world of increasing complexity and polarization, system orchestrators drive collective action to achieve outsized impact." *** P.S. You can read the full article here https://lnkd.in/equAh8jA, but just one snippet that resonated: “System orchestrators play a critical role in bringing about transformational social change by knitting together actors and institutions, providing backbone infrastructure, and mobilizing collective change efforts across ecosystems, sectors, and geographies. Along the way, they shape new paradigms, leverage system-wide resources, and navigate complexity, all to create forward momentum and progress at societal scale.” A big thanks to Don Gips Tulaine M. Rohini Nilekani Philanthropies Cristiane Sultani for your collective authorship and leadership in this space! *Pictured with the amazing composer/conductor Dean Stevenson at Mona - Museum of Old and New Art on Day 19 of my Churchill Fellowship, analysing the similarities of orchestras and systems change. Check out https://lnkd.in/emSdMJhx for more geeking out.

👏 166 changemakers gathered for the Fair Education Youth Summit during October half-term – check out our highlights video below! 🚀 The Fair Education Alliance Youth Steering Group and Mission 44 Youth Advisory Board hosted our largest Fair Education Youth Summit yet. Designed and led by young people, it brought together 166 young changemakers to influence decision makers, build connections, and develop leadership skills for driving change. What was the result? Connection, inspiration and commitment! 🛠️ The Youth Summit featured sessions to develop skills for social action and opportunities to engage directly with policy makers, with 40 expert speakers, including 22 young changemakers, journalist Coco K., decision makers Sarah Smith, Munira Wilson and representatives from Department for Education, Ofsted, Children's Commissioner for England and Department for Culture, Media and Sport. 🙌 We are really proud that 93% of attendees rated the event 4-5 stars 🌟 . Even more importantly, the young people thought the event had an impact on them and their ability to lead change in the education sector. 📊 87% of attendees learnt something to help them bring about change 📊 84% reported developing skills for youth leadership 📊 87% felt they had the opportunity to influence policy makers 📊 66% planned to share their learnings with their peers, spreading the impact even further! ❤️ A big thank you to UBS for their generosity in hosting the event. 📺 Watch and share our highlights video below ( 📽️ Orlando Del Maestro) #YouthEngagement #YouthParticipation #YouthVoice #YouthSummit #FairEdForAll #FairEducation #Inclusive #EducationalInequity #YouthAndDemocracy #EmpoweringConversations #YouthVoices #PoliticalEngagement #YouthEmpowerment #Education #YouthSummit2024

Earlier this year, we brought our Scaling Award winners together for an intimate retreat at Jamie's Farm, creating a safe space to share challenges, reflect and strategise together... Here’s what some of our award winners took away from this experience: 🫶 “A highlight was....the opportunity to connect with other leaders, to understand our shared challenges, and work out ways to help each other.” – Nicole Rodden, Co-founder of Life Lessons Education 🌱“It's been amazing to be away from the office, away from emails, and have this time to think strategically in such a beautiful place.” – Jamie O'Connell, Co-founder of Life Lessons Education 🌿 “I’ve learned so much about connection and collaboration and working with others to create longer-term change.” – Jodie Wickers, Chief Executive of Khulisa 💡 “One of my biggest takeaways is how we make meaningful change within our own systems, our organizations, and the broader educational landscape.” – Gaby Sumner, Chief Executive of Villiers Park Educational Trust Thank you to award winners Sarah Waite, Tom Harbour, Julie Randles, and Lindsey MacDonald, PhD who also joined us and to Jamie's Farm for the beautiful setting that made this retreat so memorable! #FEAScalingAward

🙌 Our trustees are phenomenal year round, but as Trustees’ Week draws to a close, we wanted to say a special thank you for their dedication to cross-sector collaboration. Their support is critical for the alliance and their leadership in the sector guides us all. Thank you to our chair Vanessa Ogden and vice-chair Zulum Elumogo, and our trustees Dame Julia Cleverdon DCVO, CBE, Russell Hobby CBE, Lamide Odanye, Natalie Perera, Brett Wigdortz OBE and Nick Wright! #trusteesweek

Villiers Park Educational Trust empower young people from under-represented backgrounds to achieve their full potential. Since winning the 2023 Scaling Award, they've expanded their impact by over 200%, reaching 2,000 young people across 50 schools nationwide! 🏫✨Through their Future Leaders programme, young people receive personalised coaching, confidence-building, and opportunities that inspire them to chart their future. Recent surveys show that 92% of participants found long-term coaching incredibly helpful, with over two-thirds more certain about their future plans. "Scaling Award support has enabled Villiers Park to scale our impact and reach significantly over the past year, and doing so in a sustainable way. Being part of the Scaling Award cohort has also been incredibly valuable in building a peer network of other Chief Executives and their wider teams, all of whom share a commitment to young people's futures. In Villiers Park’s 100th year, and as we develop our new five-year strategy, this support has been exceptional." – Gaby Sumner, CEO of Villiers Park. The Scaling Award has been instrumental in: ✅ Updating their theory of change with The Social Investment Consultancy (TSIC), embedding data-driven decision-making. 🌐 Partnering with Bain & Company to strengthen their digital strategy and LaunchPad platform, enhancing engagement and content accessibility. 💡 Developing a high-performing leadership team through retreats, strategy sessions, and line management training. We are proud to support Villiers Park in their journey to create brighter futures for thousands of young people. #FEAScalingAward #ScalingImpact

💷 Fair Education Alliance Autumn Budget response 💷 We were pleased to see the Chancellor make a substantial investment in schools in yesterday’s Autumn Budget. The £2.3 billion committed to schools, including £1 billion for SEND and £30 million for breakfast clubs, are crucial steps. We are also happy to see real-terms per-pupil spending above its 2010 level for the first time. The £6.7 billion committed to capital funding and £2.1 billion for school maintenance are sorely needed, and £15 million to begin delivery of 3,000 schools-based nurseries is a welcome start in early years. That these commitments have happened in such a tough fiscal climate is an important signal that education is regaining political prominence.   In addition, we are happy to see the government invest £100 million in innovation at local and regional levels. So many of the challenges we face will be solved within and by communities, and this is an encouraging sign of more effective join-up across services. However, to properly shift outcomes for the most vulnerable children and young people, investments made here must be coupled with changes to address the root causes of the challenges we face. We urge the Government to restore real-term Pupil Premium funding and extend the Pupil Premium to Early Years and Post-16 settings, where it is arguably even more needed. 💡 Bellow are some (short and long-term) changes we would like to see funded through this and subsequent budgets.💡   Teacher recruitment and retention 📖 Improve recruitment and promotion processes and support to better retain individuals from ethnic minority backgrounds at application stage through to senior leadership. 📖 Incentivise schools to adopt flexible working approaches to make teaching a sustainable career choice.  SEND 🔵 Define what an inclusive school culture looks like and fund the spread of this practice around the system. 🔵 Direct some of the £100 million innovation fund towards the join-up of public services around children with SEND.  Early education and childcare 🐣 Children whose parents are in training or out of work should receive the government’s funded childcare hours entitlement. 🐣 Joined up working of public services in the early years outside of formal settings to promote the development of children who do not attend formal settings, as this is disproportionately those from low-income households and with SEND. While we must deliver the best possible education for those in the system now, we must also not lose the opportunity to ensure the plans we set up for the future will result in a fairer education system for every child in the generations to come. You can find the full response on our website: https://lnkd.in/eSZEn7_N

🤯166 young people attended our 2024 Fair Education Youth Summit with Mission 44 today at UBS in Central London, a conference designed by and for young people who have faced barriers to education. Here are our highlights from the day:     We heard from MPs and policy/decision makers on how young people’s input is taken into consideration and implemented in policy making.     Thought provoking breakout sessions included:    👉 How young people can get involved and have their voices heard, led by Youth Advisory Board members    👉 How young people can use content creation as a tool for change with Coco Khan     👉 Learning how to incorporate social action, soft skills and experience into your CV with Felicity Halstead from GoodWork

From neighbourhood to national... It's a couple of weeks since our roundtable on systems and place-based change and, in our recent member bulletin, Gina Cicerone has been reflecting on what we've learned: "We heard from dozens of members in our workshop about the intersection between systems change and place-based change. We discussed a few risks and how to mitigate them: - Not enough focus on ourself: When exploring this deeply, what did it all come down to? Us. One participant asked “do we need to change people or ourselves, rather than systems”. Louisa from AllChild (Formerly West London Zone) talked about epistemic humility, which recognises that our own knowledge is incomplete and provisional, and sets us up for constant learning. I think that’s one amazing mental model that can support our growth. We need to embed practices to identify and challenge our own mental models. - Competing across the country: Through the resurgence of “place”, there are many backbone organisations, anchor institutions and local convenors. We all have a role to play, whether connector, facilitator, disruptor or activator, and our join-up is key. This can be hard: everyone is trying to ensure maximum impact and, often, sustainability. Instead of duplication, we need to focus on building trust as an outcome in and of itself – with all those involved, not just community members. - We see “place” as the panacea: As Graeme from Right To Succeed said, the key factor for work in place is the community – for both leadership and involvement. But we must balance that with the fact that community can’t happen in a silo – we need partnerships all the way from neighbourhood to national, and sharing between communities. There are also other ways to take a systems change approach besides place - so starting with the six conditions framework can be a helpful guide to mapping that out. - Ignoring the root causes: Local authorities are facing reduced funding or bankruptcy (reiterated again in the National Audit Office’s SEN report), so other backbones emerge to take on the issues that sometimes were, can and/or should be addressed by local government. This is an opportunity to address the root causes so we don’t end up in a similar situation, but just through another route. What next? We're looking forward to continuing this important conversation with our members and stakeholders. If you’d like to learn more about our work on systems and place-based change or share your own experience, please comment below. If you're part of a member organisation, make sure you use our updated Ecosystem Map – it’s packed with information on member activity in 24,000 education settings across England. It’s a vital tool for collaboration across regions and localities, allowing you to filter by local authority, parliamentary constituency, member activity and more.”

💷 Budget 2024: Protect School budgets and invest in educational opportunity for every child.   If we are to achieve the economic growth and strengthened society that the Government and voters want, we must start with education, and we must have cooperation from business, civil society and government, both at a national and local level.    The education system is in urgent need of investment to prepare our society to prosper in the future. Increasingly, there is a wedge being driven between pupils from low-income families and others, and the proportion of children living in poverty continues to increase. We haven’t equipped schools to meet the needs of the children with the greatest challenges, and that’s impacting our ability to recruit and retain teachers, children’s engagement with education, and the attainment gap that has grown ever wider.    To reverse the present trend, we need sustained attention to its root causes. Through the insight and expertise of our membership, we know what’s needed, and this is laid out in full in our Priorities for a New Government. Achieving a fair education for every child will require investment, and we urge the Government to protect school budgets despite predicted decreases in pupil numbers, and to make targeted investments to support the most vulnerable. These include:   - Extend Free School Meals eligibility to all children whose families are eligible for universal credit. Analysis shows this would bring core benefits of £8.4 billion and wider benefits of £16.2 billion over a 20-year period. - Restore Pupil Premium funding to 2015-2016 rates - Raise the Early Years Pupil Premium to match the primary rate and extend the Pupil Premium to 16-19 education at the secondary rate - Introduce 30 hours of funded early years education for all three and four-year-old children, regardless of parental education or employment status. Children from low-income families should be prioritised for funded hours, with funding covering the full cost for providers. - Restore investment in high-quality 1:1 and small-group tuition for the pupils who most need it. The National Tutoring Programme (NTP) and 16-19 Tuition Fund should be restored to support ongoing pandemic recovery. - Introduce national data collection of the wellbeing of young people so we can better understand the causes and solutions to declining pupil mental health and wellbeing.   We know that demands on the public purse are high as ever, but investing in our children and young people to thrive must be a priority – all of today’s children will be part of tomorrow’s society. This work is the reason we exist, and we look forward to working with Government to make this future a reality.