Hannah O’Neill: Positive transformation through partnership

Headquartered in London and working across England, Action Tutoring works to unlock the potential of children and young people, and reduce the attainment gap between disadvantaged pupils and their more affluent peers. In partnership with schools and with volunteer tutoring, they deliver maths and English tutoring programmes to build pupils’ subject knowledge, confidence and study skills, increasing their chance of success in key exams. Head of philanthropy Hannah O’Neill explains how a partnership with QBE Foundation is helping the charity achieve its aims.

At Action Tutoring, we don’t have a huge team working on corporate partnerships, but it’s led and driven by a lot of passion, determination and resilience! We truly believe charities cannot do it alone; to create change, businesses and charities must work together. You bring different strengths and resources to ‘the table’ ­– and that’s what drives positive transformation.

In summer 2023, we were announced as QBE Foundation’s new Community Partner. The charitable arm of a leading global insurance group, QBE Foundation pledged over £1.5 million to us across a three-year partnership, running until 2026.

A shared focus

They had a focus on ‘inclusion’, and that’s what we’re all about: ensuring disadvantaged pupils can access opportunities such as further education, employment and training. They had a refreshing approach to philanthropy, wanting to move beyond funding alone and really dive into our mission.

Agreed outcomes

As such, our partnership is focused on four key outcomes:

• Increase Action Tutoring’s geographical reach, with an ambition for 30% of our delivery to be based outside our current urban hubs by 2026, with a particular focus on overlooked rural and seaside communities.
• Grow the number of pupils we support each year to 10,000 in 2027.
• Drive our impact by empowering our pupils to match the national average pass rates for all pupils in English SATs and GCSEs, helping to reduce the attainment gap.
• Advocacy for tutoring support for disadvantaged pupils.

Working together

QBE Foundation is helping us move closer to these ambitions in a number of ways; they regularly encourage their colleagues to volunteer as tutors, connect us with potential useful contacts, and provide opportunities to visit their regional offices and deliver presentations to their teams both virtually and in-person. They also help us raise awareness of educational disadvantages through blogs, social media campaigns, videos, case studies (even supplying teams and resources to help us go into schools and conduct pupil and tutor interviews), provide us with office space, and engage their employees with fundraising challenges throughout the year.

As our partnership has progressed, we’ve developed the aims we want to achieve. For example, we started out with a handful of QBE colleagues volunteering as tutors; but as engagement grew, we set a target to get 10% of their UK colleagues as volunteers. We co-designed a strategy to ensure we were clear in our mutual ambitions and aligned on how we would achieve them, and what success would look like.

Maintaining close contact

We have regular catch ups and always look for ways to improve what we’re doing and how we do it. We ensure our connection goes beyond just our philanthropy team and their Ttustees – our marketing teams are connected, their colleagues know our programme delivery team through tutoring weekly, and their senior leaders have visited schools to see our programmes in action. Their Foundation Chairman even joined our annual team day to talk to our 70+ staff team about who they are, what they do and why they chose Action Tutoring as a partner, which is great for engaging our team in the partnership more deeply (especially when we’re all based across England).

Real partnership

They’re also helping us shape our thinking and strategies to some of the key business ‘challenges’ we’re facing, such as their Executive Team spending a whole day with our SLT to consider how to tackle developing more fruitful partnerships, enhance our approach to sustainability and refine our staff development offer. They really want to see us succeed as a charity and encourage other corporations with our work too; they have a very collaborative approach to the partnership and an aspirational ambition to do all they can to help as many children and young people from disadvantaged backgrounds to achieve academically and take their next step in life.

A key highlight was when a video QBE Foundation made about us was shortlisted as a finalist in the Corporate Cause category of the 2024 Smiley Charity Film Awards. The film was created to increase engagement and awareness across QBE colleagues and regional offices by highlighting the educational disadvantage and the solution we offer.

We love working with QBE Foundation. We have a few years of our current partnership left, but hope to extend it. We’re doing great work together and have the potential to support even more disadvantaged young people to achieve.

Sharing key learnings
Organisations often have limited time or resources, or both – so it’s critical to ensure you’re in alignment with a potential partner. As a charity it’s tempting to try to drive a partnership, even if it’s not suited to your mission – but that business could be providing critical support to a charity they have deeper synergy with ­– and your ideal corporate partner could be closer than you think. So really review the opportunity: is it right for your charity, and is it right for right now?

It’s also important to remember it’s a partnership; show your partner the impact you’re having together and take them ‘on the journey’. If things are challenging and you’re facing hurdles, tell them! It’s much better to work towards solutions together. Communication is key!

Hannah O’Neill

About Hannah O’Neill

Hannah O’Neill is the head of philanthropy at Action Tutoring. Having been with the education charity for over seven years, Hannah first spent 3.5 years in direct delivery, coordinating the charity’s tutoring programmes across Liverpool, where she’s based, before moving into partnerships and fundraising. She now leads the charity’s philanthropy team to drive fruitful, sustainable and transformational corporate partnerships, whilst overseeing all fundraising activities and initiatives.