Worldwide, social-emotional skills at age 15 are 30% lower than at age 10. This contributes to declining wellbeing, poorer academic attainment, and a major employability skills gap. We developed the Persona Life Skills platform to help schools and colleges reverse this disturbing trend, using a unique personality insights approach to help young people achieve more positive outcomes.
There is a causal link between social-emotional skills such as self awareness, communication and perseverance, and improved wellbeing, attainment and employability.
Social-emotional learning is accelerated and deepened with a personality insights approach. Persona Life Skills takes this idea one step further by guiding students to apply personality insights to their interactions with others, as they learn 22 life skills that help them achieve positive outcomes in social, learning and work life challenges.
Our spiral curriculum complements existing Personal Development, SEL, PSHE/SMSC and Citizenship programmes. The platform includes personality and adaptability quizzes, 21 teacher-facilitated modules, and 66 self-directed modules – 38 hours of learning.
94% of students report they learnt how to improve the targeted life skills.
97% of teachers say the platform improves students’ employability and 94% say it improves wellbeing. 95% rate it “Excellent” or “Great” on EdTech Impact.
Our journey began in 2020 with two grants from UK R&D agency Innovate UK, funding the development of our unique personality insights algorithm, user interface, and initial content.
The MVP was tested in the UK, Spain and Malaysia, and we released the Persona Life Skills freemium product in 2021.
Pilots were conducted with 85 schools/colleges in 14 countries, and improvements made to usability, features and content. To date 542 schools/colleges in 46 countries have registered to use the platform, and private schools, state schools and local government have bought subscriptions.
We were a finalist in the Super Connect for Good competition, and a GESS Awards 'Wellbeing' finalist. We have also been shortlisted for WISE Edtech Accelerator, H-FARM FuturED accelerator and Tools Competition.
Register for a free teacher/school account at https://persona.education/register. After registering, you can access the platform to look around and use the free version with your students and colleagues for as long as you like. You will also receive a link to a pre-populated demo site with a built-in guided tour, to see how it works in practice.
