Youth Steering Group
Impact stories: Ryan
Name: Ryan
Age joined the Youth Steering Group: 19
Home Region: Midlands
Ryan joined the FEA Youth Steering Group in 2023, aged 19, and graduated in 2026. During his time on the Youth Steering Group, Ryan attended the Advanced British Standard Youth Consultation with the Edge Foundation, worked as the FEA 2024 Summer Intern, spoke at the Conservative Party Conference on the EPI panel, contributed to our Annual Report, and co-designed and co-led the ‘Social Action on Your CV’ session at the 2026 Youth Summit.
“We're showing everybody around who has turned up that day that you can be a young advocate and it can work.”
How have you found being on the Youth Steering Group (YSG) overall?
Good, it's been a really, really positive experience throughout it all. I think that the mix of both in-person and online settings is really, really good. Whilst you can communicate with people online as we are doing now and you can do it reasonably well, with a group of 15-20 of us, having all of us in the same room together actually getting to meet each other, that's definitely fun. It also means like the only time that we're meeting each other as Youth Steering Group isn't when we're representing something. So it's not like we're turning up to a roundtable or to the Youth Summit or going, hi, it's nice to meet you in person for the first time. So that's definitely [good].
If you had to pick one thing that’s been a highlight of your time on the Youth Steering Group, what would it be?
I think definitely going from the internship and then like a lot of the planning development for the Youth Summit being done by Elijah and myself. That was a big undertaking, but I think we got it to work.
What do you think has been the Youth Steering Group’s most impactful activity?
I think that the Youth Summit is definitely, definitely up there. And I know that it doesn't feel impactful in the way of we're not sending young people to speak on events and that sort of thing, but I mean like Zack [Polanski] said, the guy who's running for the Deputy Green Mayor [of Hackney, Dylan Law] was at the [Youth Summit] previously. And that's direct impact there. The amount of people that spoke to me after the first Youth Summit and also after the second going like, “how can I get more involved in this? How can I join the FEA?”, there's a lot of people who got big interest in doing it. And I think whilst we're not putting ourselves directly forwards and going, this is what we're saying, put it on a piece of paper, get it into government, we're showing everybody around who has turned up that day that you can be a young advocate and it can work.
What skills do you feel like you’ve developed during your time on the Youth Steering Group?
A lot. Becca was saying about me picking up those phones and calling people to get all of the information they needed out of them [during the internship]. If you asked me that six months before I did it, I would have gone: “Nope, I'm not calling a single person.” And I sat there in my front room, I was looking up websites, looking up emails and phone numbers. I just went “cool” and just picked up the phone and started calling people. [I developed] A lot more confidence. I had never written anything for an annual report before, so a lot more writing skills. I mean I stick to the math sides of things [usually].
What have you learned on the Youth Steering Group that you will take forward with you into your next steps?
Probably that you don't need to be the loudest voice in the room at all times to get yourself across. […] When you've taken your time to try and think about what you're going to say before you say it, you're on task, and then you can phrase things a lot more eloquently than if you [are] just letting the words fall out.
Our Youth Steering Group provides leadership on youth engagement across the Fair Education Alliance. Members are involved in the work across the Alliance, from collective action and policy influencing, to communications, events and support for our award winners.