A look back at 2022

This year we've released a range of inspirational new storyworlds from around the world, from Tanzania to the USA, covering an array of subjects including neurodiversity, refugees, climate change, spirituality, philosophy, deforestation, space travel and more.

Climate change and its impact is the theme for two of the new storyworlds that were released early this year. High Water from Guatemala explores the impact of flooding on a community in Campur, while One Billion Trees addresses the theme of responsibility, climate action, desertification and tree planting in the desert in China.

We explored migration in two new storyworlds released this year. In Journey to a New Home, released in February, we meet Adhanom, originally from Eritrea, now living in Sweden and learn about the reasons he made such a difficult journey. In Home Wasn't Built in a Day we hear a different type of migration story from 12-year-old Jasmin, who has lived in Finland all her life, and is moving 'home' to Somaliland with her family.

Young people feature in several of this year's new storyworlds. In The People's Philosopher, we follow the story of YouTuber Marcelo from Brazil, who is using social media to bring philosophy to an online audience. In Last Child of Arki, we meet Kristos On the Greek island of Arki where he attends school as the only pupil on the island. The series of 4 films introduces young viewers to a more observational documentary style which explore Kristos's life on the island and what happens when it is time to leave the island to go to high school. In Choose Your Character we meet teenager Arlo and explore identity, gender diversity and neurodiversity and hear how, for Arlo, cosplay is a way to express their identity and help them feel like they belong.

For budding scientists, 2022 saw the launch of two exciting science themed storyworlds. We Live Among Volcanoes follows Pedro, a volcanologist working on an active volcano in the Canary Islands, while Space Mission Lucy introduces two formidable female space scientists working on a space mission at NASA.

As the year closes, we have 63 immersive storyworlds available on the platform, with 5 more storyworlds releasing in January from Iran, Uganda, Sudan, Ethiopia and Brazil. The platform now incorporates 81 powerful short documentary films, with 205 rich media articles to provide further context and 337 integrated lesson assembly plans (including 58 shorter, 20 min Lyfta Time sessions as a quick and easy way to get started with Lyfta).

Our engagement and training teams have continued to support Lyfta users to get the most from the platform with valuable fortnightly content and resources around a range of awareness days such as Earth Day, Zero Waste Week, World Space Week and Mental Health Day and much more. Our Lyfta calendar links subscribers directly to the relevant lesson and assembly plans for key dates across the academic year.

In January 2022, we launched our first diversity, equity and inclusion course with expert Angela Browne and were delighted to be able to support teachers to use Lyfta to engage meaningfully with important topics like this across the whole year.

We are proud of the incredible impact our teacher community has achieved with their students through the use of Lyfta. This year we have visited and interviewed teachers and students from across the UK who are regularly using the platform. Read more about the impact that Lyfta has had in schools this year and watch some of the interviews here.

This year we delivered 20 Lyfta Live Lessons directly to classrooms around the world via Zoom. Over the course of the year we delivered 769 classes in total (over 23,000 student sessions). Together we explored Beachcomber in Cornwall for Earth Day, a live volcano in the Canary Islands, the NASA Space Centre in the USA for World Space Week, The Kids' Cup football competition in Norway during the World Cup and the National Opera and Ballet in Finland as an end of team virtual theatre trip. We have an exciting range of live lessons planned for 2023 so if you don't already have a Lyfta account, sign up for a free Lyfta Starter account now to receive information on the next round of #LyftaLive lessons.

We have been delighted to work in partnership with some amazing organisations this year.

In June we were invited by CST to deliver the 'Civic Cinema' at their Annual Conference with more than 600 trust leaders, exploring the theme of Civic Leadership #TrulyCivic.

In September we worked with Cognita on their Global Be Well day. Teachers across the world at Cognita schools used Lyfta storyworlds and lesson plans to run impactful lessons on the themes of Diet Through the Lens of Sustainability.

We also continued our work in partnership with children's charity, the Youth Sport Trust (YST) to create a scheme of work for PE teachers and sports leads which uses our storyworlds to teach students how to live healthily. Later in the year we kicked off a range of exciting seminars in collaboration with YST - exploring how to embed digital technology within PE, and how to support students' digital literacy, while also improving health, wellbeing and emotional regulation. We have more webinars lined up with YST in 2023, the first of which will explore how to embed conversations around gender equity in sport through the story of female football players.

Remember that your sports premium can be utilised to access Lyfta. Find out more here.

We are continuously looking to improve the platform and have worked with our amazing teacher community to test and launch an array of new features this year - from continuous incremental platform improvements like our enhanced content cards, to bigger changes like improvements to our 'teach in front of the class' feature and content discovery system. A heartfelt thank you to all the teachers involved in product testing this year. We strive to continue improving, so always let us know if there's anything you think we can do to make Lyfta even better!