The Fischer Family Trust
The Fischer Family Trust supports projects in health and education that are likely to have the greatest impact on improving lives, and nurtures those interventions to scale.
Mike Fischer CBE (founder of RM machines and Alamy) is a social entrepreneur with an interest in system improvement and bringing insights from industry to social sector reform. The Fischer Family Trust has changed the access of UK schools & policymakers to good data via the creation of FFT Education and FFT Datalab and has continued to make investments in trusted partners in health and education. The Fischer Family Trust is a registered charity (No 1075453).
Health
COVID-19
COVID-19 Volunteer Testing Network
The COVID-19 Volunteer Testing Network is providing assistance and resources to life sciences labs across the UK to help them convert into COVID-19 testing labs for GPs and front line staff in their local communities.
SBL
SBL is a (Community Interest) Company dedicated to improving patient treatment options through high quality, collaborative and clinically focused research. SBL has a strong scientific team with a variety of academic and industrial backgrounds. They have particular strengths in all aspects of immunology and molecular biology. Their work is focused on the following areas: DNA instability in neurons, DNA recombination in lymphocytes, cancer immunotherapy and medical guidelines on Vitamin D.
Other health projects
In 2001 The Fischer Family Trust started to get involved in medical research, with a particular focus on kidney cancer. Activities have included support for specific projects in conjunction with the following organisations:
- Steve Dunns's guide for cancer patients (www.cancerguide.org)
- KCUK - Kidney Cancer UK
- KCA - The Kidney Cancer Association (USA) The 2002 Innsbruck conference on Dendritic Cell Vaccines Support is either direct from the Trust or through SBL (Systems Biology Laboratory UK).
Education
FFT Education
FFT provides data and analyses to 13,000 schools, 150 local authorities and 200 academy trusts in UK and also to 2,000 schools in 35 countries around the world. FFT’s analyses of pupils’ results provide insightful information to school leaders and teachers to support self-evaluation, school improvement and to set aspirational targets for pupils. FFT Education Ltd is an independent, non-profit company which was established in 2001 and has links to the Fischer Family Trust.
FFT Literacy
FFT Literacy provides a range of literacy training to schools, clusters of schools and to Local Authorities, drawing on their experience as a developer of interventions and teaching and training programmes in reading, writing, speaking and listening.
FFT Education Datalab
We are proud to have set up FFT Education Datalab, whose mission is to be the UK’s centre of excellence for quantitative research in education.
Success for All
Repeated analysis shows that literacy outcomes at KS1 are closely correlated with success at KS4. Eliminating early literacy failure was identified more than 20 years ago as the ‘Apex project’ for UK education: i.e. the single most significant change to create the largest impact on educational outcomes. The Fischer Family Trust supports its partner Success for All UK (SFA UK) – an outstanding evidence-based programme for improving early literacy teaching and learning. Current interventions build on an evidence base in in the US since the 1980s and iterated in the UK since 1997.
National Tutoring Progamme
The Trust has supported the resource development and piloting of an online reading tutoring programme that has been created by Success for All USA. FFT Education are now able to bring this programme to 14,000 vulnerable young learners as part of the UK government’s Covid catch-up initiative: the National Tutoring Programme.
Maritime & conservation
The Fischer Family Trust supports projects in the area of Maritime history, through Oxford Maritime Trust and Oxford Maritime Limited. The Fischer Family Trust is involved in a number of projects to protect highly endangered species in Africa.