How coalitions break down silos

The Fair Education Alliance (FEA) represents 250 member organisations with an interest in education. It started with a conversation about sector silos. There were businesses, charities, and public sector organisations working independently on education issues – what might happen if they got together and began to organise to make education fair?

 

 

Finding shared priorities

 

Members of the FEA all agree that no child’s success should be limited by their socio-economic background. According to Janeen Hayat, the FEA’s Director of Collective Action, what brought members together originally was “an agreed understanding of how we were going to measure progress over time.” They identified five goals: 

• To narrow the gap in literacy in numeracy by the end end of KS2 (primary)
• To narrow the gap in literacy in numeracy at KS4 - GCSE (secondary)
• To ensure young people develop key strengths including resilience and wellbeing
• To narrow the gap between young people taking part in employment or Further Education after school
• To narrow the gap in access to university

The FEA supports members by gathering data against these goals, but Hayat adds that they are increasingly focussed on “creating connections and facilitating collaboration in the sector.”

 

In the past ten years, collaboration between members with the support of the FEA has increased diversity in leadership, identified and scaled solutions to sector issues, and created change through collective action.

 

 

Increasing diversity in leadership

 

The FEA is working to break down silos between those making policy and younger people with lived experience of the education system. Listening to and learning from young people is a big priority for the FEA and its members. In 2021 they developed a Youth Steering Group to ensure that young people were “equal partners” in their youth engagement strategy.

 

The group is made up of 26 young people aged 14-24 with lived experience of the English education system. They support the FEA and its members with:

• Reducing inequality in education
• Leadership for youth engagement
• Serving young people and their communities
• Youth social action in education and beyond

The Youth Steering Group’s views are also accessible to members to ensure that young people are represented across the membership.

 

 

Finding and scaling solutions

 

When it comes to busting silos, funding and support structures can be an issue as charities compete for the same resources. The FEA has developed an approach to awards and funding based on collaboration. Their awards “leverage the expertise and connections of our membership, and the power of the network of over 250 organisations to amplify and collaborate, enabling systemic change.”

 

Their scaling award provides winners with:

• 1:1 strategic and operational support
• Impact and evaluation consultancy
• Expert masterclasses and a leadership residential
• Access to a network of leaders, mentors, and peers

For example, previous winners School Home Support work with the whole family unit to identify the underlying cause of extended school absences. After scaling their offering, they were able to support over 18,000 children in 2021/22 and 70% of the persistently absent children they worked with spent an average of six more weeks in school.

 

 

Collective action

 

The FEA membership has been inspired by the power of collective action in comparison with advocacy in silos. Hayat says, “where priorities overlap, we’re much stronger when we can use the same words and we can use the same messages.

 

“We brought together all of our members working on tuition. They are natural competitors, but they also had a common interest in improving government support for tuition and making sure funding is directed to the people who need it most.”

 

Susannah Hardyman, Founder and CEO at Action Tutoring describes how the pandemic brought member organisations together. She says it helped to break down silos and is “really encouraged that the walls haven’t gone back up”.

 

The advocacy group all had a shared priority - closing the post-pandemic attainment gap - and decided to focus on the government’s flagship solution, the National Tutoring Programme.

 

They identified shared policy concerns:

• The programme was losing focus on pupils with disadvantage
• It was, in some cases (understandably), covering gaps in budget for teaching provision
• The tutoring group sizes were growing

Through writing letters to MPs and Ministers and mentioning their collective reach into different geographies and communities, the group was able to secure meetings with key stakeholders like Robin Walker, Chair of the Education Select Committee. Hardyman says, “it looks much more punchy to have a number from ten organisations rather than just one, It becomes a number that’s much harder for politicians and policymakers to ignore.”

 

According to the FEA, the group was able to “influence the focus of the National Tutoring Programme (NTP), ensuring small group ratios and prioritisation of pupils eligible for pupil premium.”