Directory of Services

FFT Education

Who we are

FFT is a non-profit organisation aiming to making a difference in education, raising aspirations for all pupils and driving school improvement. Established in 2001 as part of the Fischer Family Trust, FFT’s services and resources are widely used in UK and around the world.

We believe that success in life is built on a solid foundation of learning. A first critical step is to learn how to read. From our research we know that children who cannot read at the expected standard by the end of Year 2 have a much lower chance of achieving a Grade 4 or above in GCSE English. Our mission is to give all children a solid, full start to literacy and learning to read.

In addition, our research team at FFT Education Datalab, produces independent, cutting-edge research that can be used by policy makers to inform education policy, and by schools to improve practice. FFT Education Datalab works collaboratively with research partners and makes sure its published research is accessible to policy makers and schools.

FFT also provide free CPD to schools as part of their mission to help schools improve.

What we do

FFT offers several highly trusted services and resources to schools in the UK and internationally.

The first is FFT Aspire, which provides schools and MATs with a number of invaluable tools including:

Aspire Pupil Tracking which allows primary teachers to monitor and track individual pupils, classes, groups and cohorts. It also allows schools to convert and compare their DfE tests, standardised tests, teacher assessments, targets and FFT estimates in one single tracking system.

Self-evaluation allows schools and MATs to quickly, and comprehensively, evaluate their own attainment and progress at the end of each key stage.

Target setting offers MAT, school and subject-by-subject look at future KS1, KS2, KS4 and KS5 performance up to four years ahead. Compare Aspire’s estimates for your school or MAT to our three benchmarks based on ‘average’, ‘high’ and ‘very high’ rates of progress. Set challenging and realistic school targets ‘out of the box’ without the need to import data.

Collaborate allows schools to benchmark their school against other schools – and identify and share best practice across groups of schools. The perfect toolkit for MATS.

Attendance tracker provides schools and MATs with the latest up-to-date weekly attendance data. It covers attendance and absence at MAT and school level, right down to individual pupils. It helps MATs and schools to identify and analyse attendance issues for specific year groups, pupil groups and individual pupils. Most importantly, it allows you to compare your pupils’ attendance to similar pupils across the country on a week-by-week basis.

Year 7 Transition Service - Schools using CAT4 assessments can now access a full range of pupil, subject and school-based GCSE estimates for Year 7 and year 8 cohort in Aspire. MATs and schools can then use FFT’s interactive Target Setting dashboard to monitor progress and set aspirational targets.

Early Intervention - With FFT Student Explorer in Aspire, the moment a pupil arrives at school - you’ll have instant access to their whole education history — past attainment and progress, absence, previous schools, Pupil Premium status and more.

FFT also provides resources for Primary schools, including:

Success for All Phonics - A proven systematic synthetic phonics teaching programme, validated by the DfE based on the Letters and Sounds progression.

Tutoring with the Lightning Squad - A tutoring programme which improves reading skills for pupils in Years 1 to 5, which is approved by the National Tutoring Programme.

Reciprocal Reading - This is an effective and proven approach to developing reading and comprehension. As an intervention programme it is particularly effective with children who can decode but do not fully understand what they read. However, the reciprocal reading approach and strategies are also very helpful for shared reading and, particularly, guided reading.

We also have a number of other Primary literacy programmes.

How we help

We are passionate about education and committed to helping schools in a number of ways. Aspire is used in 1000s of schools across the UK and enables schools to improve - and set aspirational targets.

By giving them these powerful tools they can track and monitor pupil progress, self-evaluate and share data. In addition by offering Primary schools high quality teaching materials and training we enable every child to have the best start with reading.

As a not-for-profit organisation, we are committed to giving schools the best value resources combined with the best training to ensure children make great progress.