Our Story

Every institute begins with a question. Ours was a simple one: how can we help people learn more effectively?

IALM was founded in March 2018 by Fabian Lord and Montgomery Lord, and in March 2020 was formally registered as a Charitable Incorporated Organisation with the Charity Commission for England and Wales. In those early years we were known as Young Active Minds, and our focus was narrower: helping young people strengthen their memory and study skills, and discover what they were truly capable of.

That work taught us something important. The most powerful gains came not from any single technique, but from helping learners understand and take charge of their own thinking — in other words, from metacognition. As our understanding deepened, so did our ambition. We saw that the principles we were applying with young learners held just as true for adults, for educators and for institutions, and that the gap between what research reveals about learning and what happens in practice was wide, and worth closing.

In 2026, we marked that evolution with a new identity. Young Active Minds became the Institute for Advanced Learning & Metacognition, and we broadened our purpose well beyond our original focus on memory. Today our work encompasses research into how people learn, the advancement of evidence-informed learning strategies, and a growing ambition to inform educational policy and practice across the United Kingdom and beyond.

We have travelled a long way from where we began. But the original question still drives us — we are simply asking it on a far greater scale.