Innovate UK funded edtech startup makes its social-emotional life skills online learning platform available to as many secondary students, teachers, schools and colleges as possible, to help address gaps in wellbeing and employability resulting from the COVID-19 pandemic.

 Persona Education, the UK based edtech start-up developing life skills solutions for secondary schools and colleges, has announced free access to its flagship Persona Life Skills personality insights e-learning platform.

Teachers can now create a free Persona Life Skills account and use it with any number of students, for any length of time.

Persona Life Skills is the online learning platform on which students aged 13-19 develop social-emotional life skills to boost their wellbeing and employability, with a unique personality insights framework at its heart.

Since its launch in October 2020, 50 schools and colleges have signed up to use the Persona Life Skills platform with over 10,000 students. The online learning software has been adopted by educational institutions in Australia, India, Malaysia, Myanmar, Spain, Singapore, United Arab Emirates and the United Kingdom.

At the end of a trying academic year for educators in many countries, both teacher and student wellbeing is at a low point. With the free version of Persona Life Skills announced today, Persona Education aims to make a free online tool available to teachers responsible for personal, social & health education (PSHE), relationships & sex education (RSE), social-emotional

learning (SEL), life skills and careers, that will enable them to boost their students’ wellbeing and employability.

Persona Life Skills employs an engaging learning journey built around a scientifically proven framework. Wrapped in a metaphor of exploring an archipelago of islands representing different life challenges, and taking guided tours focusing on various life skills, Persona’s pedagogy is rooted in large scale empirical research by behavioural scientists.

The free Persona Life Skills account includes all 44 ‘My Guided Tour’ life skill modules, three ‘Must See Island’ personality insights modules, and three ‘Discovery Island’ life challenge modules. Full access to all modules is available with a paid subscription.

The platform enables educators to develop their pupils’ social-emotional life skills, boosting their wellbeing across three contexts: Social, Learning and Work. The importance of ‘soft’ skills is increasingly recognised by employers. In Persona Life Skills students improve employability, equipping themselves with social-emotional skills for the workplace.

Persona Life Skills also enhances schools and colleges’ PSHE, RSE, SEL and careers education, building wellbeing and employability by developing life skills mapped to Ofsted, Independent Schools Inspectorate, PSHE Association, International Baccalaureate, GL Assessment, Gatsby, VIA Character, Skills Builder and other benchmarks.

More than ever before young people need to develop social-emotional life skills, but schools and colleges face three big problems: 1. other curriculum priorities; 2. lack of specialist teachers; 3. PSHE/SEL teacher workload. With Persona Life Skills any teacher can facilitate the learning, in the classroom or remotely. Ready-made learning modules and built-in teacher guidance, mean less demand for SEL/PSHE specialists and quicker lesson-planning, and students receive instant in-app feedback, so there is no need for teachers to spend time on marking.

“With this free version of Persona Life Skills we are democratising online social-emotional learning, reaching as many secondary students around the world as possible,” said Pete Read, CEO & Founder of Persona Education.

“Helping students understand themselves and others is key to wellbeing and academic success in school, as well as future employment prospects, and that is exactly what we are doing at Persona Education by making the Persona Life Skills web app free for teachers and their students,” said Dr Leila Walker, Chief Product Oicer of Persona Education.

To register for a free account with access for any number of students, visit www.persona-life.com.

About Persona Education Ltd

Persona Education is a UK based edtech start-up developing life skills solutions for secondary students and educational institutions. Its web and mobile e-learning apps are built around a scientifically proven personality insights framework, that is social, practical and memorable. For further information contact info@persona-life.com or +44 (0)117 313 2897.

About Persona Life Skills

Persona Life Skills is an e-learning platform for schools and colleges that uses personality insights to help teenagers navigate their life journey. The scaffolded, age appropriate curriculum guides students in building 22 life skills that map to Ofsted, ISI, Skills Builder, IB Learner Profile, AS Tracking, VIA Character and Gatsby benchmarks. For further information contact info@persona-life.com or +44 (0)117 313 2897