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 recognise that every person is unique – and this applies to how people learn. Each myLife session includes some core activities that we recommend as essential for delivering the main content. Alongside these are optional activities that you can select based on the needs and interests of your group.

These optional activities offer different ways for participants to engage with the material – whether through creative expression, discussion, or movement. We’ve also included some activities that are more challenging or philosophical, designed for participants who might enjoy deeper reflection.

Where relevant, we’ve provided alternative ways to run activities based on your context, as well as prompts to help you tailor examples to your group.

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 sessions, there is some cutting out 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.

Every myLife session follows the same format, which comprises of three main sections: Introduce, Connect, Apply. Within each section are five activities, some of which are mandatory and some 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 that 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 that gets participants moving and up and 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 with each course, 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.

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 those who have purchased a myLife course, 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.