What if we understood how a young person learns — not just the difficulties they experience?

Executive functions are the invisible processes that help us manage our thinking, learning, actions and emotions, enabling us to get things done.

They include things like holding information in mind, managing where we direct our attention, and adapting when things change or when we need to see something from a different perspective.

Because these processes are invisible, parents and teachers often have to infer what is happening from the behaviour they see.

The EF Learning Profile helps make more of this visible. It brings together a young person’s strengths, their executive function profile, the challenges they experience, what helps them learn and, importantly, their own voice.

What does the EF Learning Profile explore?

💪🏽 Their strengths
What does your young person recognise as strengths in themselves and their learning?

🧠 Their executive function profile
Where are their relative strengths, and where might they need more support?

📈 The challenges they experience
Which everyday classroom activities and demands do they find particularly difficult?

🧑🏽‍💻 What helps them learn
What strategies and supports do they say make a difference?

💬 Their voice
What else would they like the adults supporting them to understand about them and their experience of learning?

⭐️ 📈Together, these create a richer picture than a label or difficulty alone.

If you’re selected for this first pilot, you will be asked to:

• complete the EF Learning Profile with your young person
• read their resulting EF Learning Profile
• receive and review a Personalised Action Plan
• give us short, honest feedback about the experience

We’re testing the whole journey, so we want to know if anything is confusing, difficult to use or simply doesn’t feel useful.

There are no right or wrong responses. We want young people to tell us about their experience of learning.

We want a range of families with young people aged 12–17.

Your young person does not need a diagnosis or identified additional support need. We’re interested in young people with different strengths, experiences and approaches to learning — including those who find some aspects of school difficult and those whose needs may not currently be recognised.

What matters is that you and your young person are willing to explore their experience of learning together and tell us what you think of the EFLP.