More Impact, More Change: Our Strategy Refresh Journey
In 2025, we are refreshing our strategy at the Fair Education Alliance, looking ahead to the next five years and building on our incredible work together to tackle educational inequity. In this blog, our Director of Operations & Impact, Rachel, shares why we’re refreshing our strategy now and how we’re approaching it.
Our strategy refresh is officially underway, and today's first member workshop in Newcastle was an important step in shaping our future direction. It was invaluable to meet with members in person, hear your insights, and discuss how we can work together to drive real change in the education system.
For us, strategy is a set of high-level decisions that help us to set priorities, purpose and resources. We decided to refresh our strategy this year for a few reasons.
Firstly, the external context for our work has changed since our 2019 strategy – with the outcomes gaps between children from lower socio-economic backgrounds and their peers at their widest in a decade, tough economic circumstances for families, the education sector and the charity sector, a greater focus on devolution and regional collaboration, and a Labour government for the first time in the FEA’s history.
Secondly, we’ve had a lot of internal change since the FEA was founded in 2014, growing from a staff team of two to fifteen, and from 25 to 300 member organisations. We have had plenty of valuable insights and feedback from staff, members and other stakeholders about what’s needed now and, in the years, ahead. We’re excited to continue those conversations over the next few weeks in our upcoming member workshops in London, Manchester as well as our virtual sessions.
Our aims
With all of that in mind, we have three key aims for our updated 2025-30 strategy:
Ambition – we need to continue taking a long-term view of what’s needed to make education fair, and we need to show that everyone has a role to play if we are going to improve things for children and young people.
Learning – we need to continue to learn a lot about movements, networks, systems change, collective impact, place-based approaches, the complexity and uncertainty of wicked problems, and what we can do differently to catalyse progress. You can find out more about this in our Resources Hub here.
Clarity – while some uncertainty is inevitable, we need to be as clear as possible about what we are trying to achieve, how we think we can get there and what aspects of our work are making the biggest difference.
Our approach
How we are approaching the strategy refresh has been informed by the experiences of our staff, Steering Group and Board of Trustees. The main framework we are using is NPC’s Strategy for Impact resource, which guides you through a series of questions about your core purpose, your external environment, and your resources and capabilities. We’re also using some systems change frameworks that are helping us explore the wider system we are part of, the conditions that are holding educational inequity in place, and our current and possible role in the system. You can find out more about this in our Resources Hub here, which we’ll be adding to over the coming weeks and months.
We started by doing an internal review – taking stock of what we already knew and what questions we wanted to explore. We’re now doing a series of targeted consultations with different stakeholders, including our Youth Steering Group, our members (which include our funders) and a wider stakeholder group. All that input is then consolidated and analysed to inform decisions that will ultimately be made by our Senior Leadership Team with sign-off from our Board of Trustees at their 2025 meetings.
Reflections so far on the process
We are learning as we go and trying to embrace some of the discomfort that comes with a strategy refresh process. Here are a few things we’ve found interesting and helpful so far:
Keep the vision in mind - First and foremost, remembering that the updated strategy is not the end goal of this work. Improving the lives of children and young people is the end goal, so we keep coming back to what is going to add the most value to our ability to achieve that long-term impact.
Make consultation meaningful - The FEA’s work has always been about collaboration, and we have 300 member organisations and dozens of other organisations that we work closely with. Their experience and insights are valuable, but so is their time, so we have tried to create opportunities for targeted input without consulting for the sake of it. For our members, we’ve offered a short survey (162 members have completed the survey so far), member workshops (57% have registered so far) and 1-to-1 conversations.
Keep the team engaged – We have a small internal strategy project team who are leading the process. The rest of our team is naturally interested in the process and the decisions but simply can’t be involved in all the details. To keep people informed and ensure transparency, we have made all strategy documents available to our team on our SharePoint and we provide a weekly update on process and decisions so far in our weekly team meetings. We are also using our bi-monthly team days for more substantive updates and input.
Get involved in shaping the future of education
We want our strategy refresh to reflect the voices, insights, and expertise of our members. Your input is vital in ensuring we continue to drive meaningful change in the fight for a fair education system. Here’s how you can contribute:
Join a Strategy Refresh Workshop – Take part in interactive discussions with fellow members to explore key themes and challenges together. Sign up here.
Get in touch – If you’re not an FEA member and have questions about the strategy process, please do reach out to us directly to share your thoughts. You can email csangster@faireducation.org.uk with any queries.
Together, we can build a strategy that drives real impact and create a fairer education system for all children and young people.
