The Institute for Advanced Learning & Metacognition (IALM) has begun piloting its Learning Strategies Profile, a diagnostic tool designed to help learners understand and improve how they study, with a small number of schools, ahead of a wider rollout planned for later this year.
The Learning Strategies Profile will shortly become available as a member benefit for individual learners and tutors. The school pilot marks the first time IALM has tested the tool at scale within institutional settings, working with schools willing to trial it with groups of students and feed back on how well it works in a real classroom and pastoral context, rather than as an individual, self-directed exercise.
What the tool does
The Learning Strategies Profile is a short, structured diagnostic that helps a learner build a clearer picture of how they currently approach studying, which strategies they already rely on, which are underused, and where there may be a mismatch between how a learner thinks they study best and what the evidence suggests actually works. Rather than producing a single label or score, it is designed to prompt reflection: a starting point for a conversation between a learner and a teacher, tutor or parent about how that learner might study more effectively.
This makes the tool a natural companion to IALM’s wider work on metacognition. Where the recently launched National Metacognition Framework gives schools a structure for embedding metacognitive practice across teaching, the Learning Strategies Profile gives individual learners a concrete, personal entry point into thinking about their own learning, useful in its own right, and a practical way to bring metacognitive ideas to life for students who might otherwise find the concept abstract.
Why a school pilot
“We’ve had encouraging feedback from individual members using the Profile, but a school is a very different environment to a single learner working through it alone,” said Fabian Lord, IALM’s Director of Education. “We wanted to properly test how it holds up when a form tutor is using it with thirty students, or when it feeds into a wider pastoral or study skills programme, before we recommend it more widely. That’s exactly what this pilot is for.”
Participating schools are using the Profile with selected year groups over the course of a term, with staff feeding back on practical questions: how easily it fits into existing pastoral or tutor-time structures, whether the output is genuinely useful to both students and staff, and whether any adjustments are needed to make it work well at scale rather than one learner at a time.
Supporting teachers as well as students
A key focus of the pilot is understanding what teachers
and pastoral staff need alongside the tool itself, rather than simply handing schools a diagnostic and leaving them to interpret the results unsupported. IALM is gathering feedback on what guidance, training or follow-up materials would help staff make the most of a learner’s results, for example, how a tutor might use a student’s profile to inform a single conversation, or how a head of year might look for patterns across a whole cohort to inform wider study skills provision.
This reflects a lesson IALM has taken from its own National Metacognition Framework: that a tool or resource tends to be genuinely useful only when it comes with a clear sense of what to do next, rather than being left to stand alone. The Institute is treating the pilot as an opportunity to learn that lesson properly for the Learning Strategies Profile specifically, rather than assuming what worked for individual members will automatically translate to a school setting.
What happens next
IALM plans to use feedback from the pilot to refine the Learning Strategies Profile and the guidance that accompanies it, before making a school-ready version more widely available as part of Institutional Membership. The Institute expects the pilot to run for one full term, with an initial review of findings to follow shortly afterwards, and further phases of testing likely before any full rollout is confirmed.
This work sits within IALM’s broader ambition to translate research on learning and metacognition into practical tools that educators and learners can use with confidence, extending that same principle from whole-school frameworks and leadership CPD down to the individual learner’s own understanding of how they study best.
Schools interested in registering interest for a future phase of the pilot, or in learning more about the Learning Strategies Profile, are encouraged to get in touch via the IALM website.