A look back at 2023

Lyfta
Content Team
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Lyfta News
It’s been another busy year at Lyfta HQ! As we look back at 2023 we wanted to reflect on some of the key milestones and the impact our wonderful Lyfta community has managed to achieve with the platform this year. Most of all we would like to say a huge thank you to the incredible community of educators who do the amazing work in the classroom and continue to support our mission.
Lyfta 2023

As we move into 2024, we hope you will continue to help us in our efforts to shape a future where learning is a powerful force for connection, understanding, belonging and human flourishing. Here are some of the highlights from 2023:

Impact 

We’re adding this part first, as it’s what we care about most - the impact the use of Lyfta has on the lives of young people. 

Lyfta offers learning experiences that not only impart knowledge but also spark a sense of connection and belonging to a wider humanity. At our core, we're on a mission to help learners navigate the complexities of our world's great challenges through relatable, real human stories. We want to create a world where everyone thrives - where education is not just informative but transformative, leading to human flourishing on an intrapersonal, interpersonal, societal and global level. 

Bett Award winner for 'Transformational Impact' 2023

As a company dedicated to improving student outcomes, we take pedagogy and evidence informed practice extremely seriously. We have spent the year working with a range of schools and trusts to monitor the impact Lyfta is having in their classrooms and have gathered exciting data showing impact across a number of areas including:

  • Shifting perspectives and building empathy
  • Supporting personal development for a thriving and changing world
  • Closing gaps and boosting motivation in writing
  • Bringing the world to those with limited access

Read more about Lyfta’s classroom impact here

We were humbled and delighted to be recognised at the prestigious Bett Awards in March receiving the Award for `Transformational Impact’, an award we have been shortlisted for again for 2024.

Lyfta is helping our kids learn to read faster, learn to do their different subjects at a better rate. It's allowing them to write for longer. It's allowing them to process mathematics for longer. It's allowing them to talk about the things you'd want them to talk about with confidence and fluency in front of an Ofsted inspector… healthy eating, finance, those of different faiths, those of different cultures, healthy bodies, healthy minds… about all the things you want your kids to to know about.

TOM FAY
DIRECTOR OF SCHOOL IMPROVEMENT, PONTEFRACT ACADEMIES TRUST
Cinematic experiences - a cinema showcase!

In February 2023 around 100 school and trust leaders joined us in a cinema in North London for an evening of knowledge sharing, connection and inspiring human stories. We were lucky enough to be joined by influential figures from the sector like Leora Cruddas CBE, Mary Myatt and Musa Okwonga who shared their perspectives and introduced a showcase of Lyfta films on the big screen. The event was certainly one of our highlights this year - a huge thank you to those that were able to join us. Watch the short film for a flavour of the event.

Lyfta Showcase Film 2023
Platform and feature developments

We are continually evolving and improving the platform to meet the needs of our customers. This year, as well as a host of new cinematic storyworld experiences from around the world, we’ve introduced:

Lyfta Collections - to help educators with curriculum integration and finding the best way for Lyfta to make an impact in a variety of different contexts we’ve introduced collections. As of December 2023 we have 90+ collections like:

The Lyfta Content Calendar

A new interactive Lyfta calendar- offering educators a comprehensive, easy-to-use way to explore global awareness days and weeks, and other celebrated days with lesson plans, assemblies, blogs and video resources to help mark the occasion in the classroom.

A major speed upgrade: We rebuilt the Lyfta globe from the ground up, to make it faster to display and faster to interact with, for an all-round better teaching and learning experience. The changes resulted in load times twice, three times, or even five times faster than before (depending on the user's device and connection).

A new teacher dashboard - The dashboard is now personalised to you, welcoming you with your name, tailored content and a list of the lessons you currently have active. The dashboard also includes quick links to useful resources and schemes of work, and shows what other schools are doing with Lyfta via a social media feed.

New impact data - To help you keep track of your Lyfta journey; the places you have been and the people you have met with Lyfta, we’ve added new impact data to the dashboard.

A more sophisticated search experience - we’ve made improvements to content discoverability through search, enhanced content cards, page structure and much more.

Live Lessons

2023 was our first full year of Lyfta live lessons; 45 minute sessions, delivered via Zoom by our in-house teacher. These sessions bring together many different schools from across the UK and beyond for an exciting shared experience.

We’ve welcomed a total of 1339 classes across the year (that’s around 40,170 student sessions!) Our most recent live lesson received a 9/10 overall rating from teachers. Thank you to all the teachers and students who engage with the sessions and share their thoughts and ideas during them.

Students participate in a Lyfta Live Lesson

Read about the sessions that ran this year:

Children’s Mental Health Week (Feb)

Countdown to Earth Day (March)

Celebrating Cultural Diversity (May)

School Transition (July) 

Protecting Biodiversity (Oct) - as a partner of Global Goals Week

Hanukkah in LA (Dec)

The class really enjoyed hearing from other children of their own age about their religions and traditions. They also enjoyed getting to see inside places they would not normally have access to.

Teacher at 'Hanukkah in LA' live lesson
Dec 2023
New cinematic storyworlds experiences

New Lyfta storyworlds 2023

Our Lyfta storyworlds and human stories are at the heart of what we do and this year we’ve released new storyworlds from China, Egypt, Spain, Indonesia, Mexico, Colombia, Canada, Uganda, UK, Ethiopia and Sudan including:

Working with schools and trusts to make an impact in the lives of young people

It is incredibly inspiring to see how our community of amazing educators use Lyfta resources. Read about the experience of some of the schools and trusts we’ve been working with in 2023:

Read about the experience of Tom Fay, Director of School Improvement at Pontefract Academies Trust and the impact they have seen so far.

Read about the role of Lyfta in Personal Development at Upton Court Grammar School and how they have been using Lyfta to expand students’ horizons and help them understand others better.

Read how Spring Partnership Trust are using Lyfta, alongside Voice 21 (the national oracy charity) to create impact and improve oracy.

Read how Lampard Community Special School are using Lyfta to effectively broaden their students' experiences of the world and give them access to people, places and perspectives that might otherwise be out of reach. 

Explore more case studies showing how different schools and settings are using Lyfta.

One of the most important things we do as educators is help students explore the world around them. Lyfta's approach gives teachers the tools and the content to do this in new ways, helping students better understand people and cultures from right around the globe.

LEORA CRUDDAS CBE
CST CHIEF EXECUTIVE
Looking forward to 2024

Our desire to create a world where everyone thrives - where education is not just informative but transformative, leading to human flourishing on an intrapersonal, interpersonal, societal and global level will continue to drive us forward in 2024. We hope that our cinematic learning experiences will continue to spark a sense of connection and belonging and help learners navigate the complexities of our world's great challenges. We hope to provide transformational impact in many more schools and trusts in 2024. If you are not yet part of the community, please join us on our mission - book a call with the team now

Wishing you all a happy, healthy, enjoyable and transformative 2024.

Award
Case Study
Global Learning