FAQs

myLife has been written to support young people disengaged from education, whatever that context might be. It has been run in schools, youth groups and custodial environments. Although it has been written for an age range of 14-18 it has also been used with young adults and adults in custodial settings.

We understand that every person is unique, and that this translates to learning. There are some activities in each myLife session which we suggest are required in order to communicate the session content. However there are also optional activities which you can pick and choose according to your group. These activities help participants to connect with the session content in different ways such as creatively, through discussion and by getting out of their seats. We have also included optional activities which are more challenging or a little more philosophical for those participants who would benefit from them. Where appropriate, we have suggested different ways in which you might like to run activities depending on your context or given prompts for you to use examples which are relevant to your participants.

We have designed myLife to be run in the most restricted environment, so you won’t find any activities which require additional resources other than pens and paper and there is no requirement to use video or online resources. For some resources cutting out is required by the tutor before the session, but there is no need for participants to use scissors.

If you find video examples, articles or activities which support the learning objectives in the myLife sessions and enable your participants to engage with the course we encourage you to use these! If you find anything that particularly works, we would love to hear from you in case it would benefit other myLife tutors. In future months we plan on adding supplementary resources to the myLife website for those who have access to digital resources.

Every myLife session follows the same format, which comprises of three main sections: Introduce, Connect, Apply. Within each section are five activities, some which are mandatory and some which you can pick and choose from depending on the needs of your participants. The activities are as follows:

Drift – an activity which introduces an aspect of the topic and can be done as participants enter the room

Big Picture – an opportunity to introduce the overall theme of the session

Driving Question – the questions we aim to cover in the session

Case Studies – looking at examples in real life or the media which relate to the session topic

Core – sums up the overall theme and gets to the heart of the session

Discuss – an opportunity to practise discussion and consider other points of view

Create – an activity that connects to the topic through drawing or creative writing and thinking

Activate – an activity which gets the participants out of their seats

Demonstrate – an opportunity for you to assess where participants are at in their understanding of the topic

Invigorate – a game which doesn’t always relate to the topic and can be used to re-engage or bring lightness to a heavy part of a session

Challenge – a more challenging activity or question to consider

Wild Card – a more philosophical discussion point

Prove It – helps to apply participants’ learning in the session

Achieve – celebrating achievement in today’s session and sometimes goal setting

Reflect – an opportunity for participants and tutor to reflect on what’s been learnt, what they’re still unsure about and what could change for next time

We provide myLife Tutor Training as part of your myLife membership which we require your team to attend before running myLife. This is to ensure that you are fully equipped and supported to run the course with your participants and means that participants across Britain have a consistent experience of myLife.

There is additional mandatory training for myLife Plus members to support them in submitting courses to OCR.

We will also be adding training on relevant topics with a discounted price to myLife members.

Training is run both online and in-person to make it as accessible as possible for you and your team.

Upcoming training dates can be found in the Training section of your myLife account. If you would like to suggest a date in your local area and can’t see one listed, you can register your interest with the team at [email protected]. We currently only offer training to myLife members, but if you would like to have a more in-depth chat about running myLife, please do contact our team. 

We will be running annual refresher sessions for members who have attended training in the past. This will give tutors across different contexts to learn from each other and support best practice.

Anyone wishing to deliver myLife must be attached to your myLife account and attend official myLife Tutor Training.