Real Stories, Real Schools: How Four Secondary Schools Are Using Lyfta

Matthew Moss High School, Rochdale

Form time, community cohesion, and what the data shows

Matthew Moss High School serves 1,221 pupils in Rochdale, Greater Manchester. Around 41% are eligible for free school meals, nearly double the national average. The school has specialist provision for pupils with hearing impairment and a well-above-average SEND population. It is a high-challenge community school with a clear sense of what its young people need.

Since early 2025, Lyfta has been integrated into form time at the start of every school day, delivered each week across Years 7 to 11, with over 60 staff trained. The school placed it in that slot for a specific reason. As the Lead Teacher explains:

A Year 7 impact study running from Autumn 2025 to Spring 2026 tracked over 140 pupils across six classes, comparing baseline and follow-up surveys. Three findings are worth highlighting. The importance pupils placed on learning about other cultures increased in every one of five comparable classes, the only measure in the study with this property. Stories helping pupils feel connected to the wider world increased in four of five classes. And where engagement with Lyfta was deeper, outcomes were consistently stronger, in both the quantitative data and the qualitative responses.

The qualitative responses are particularly worth reading.

• A pupil in 7A: "be kind bc u dont know wat others have been through."
• A pupil in 7E: "Watching the videos it made me be much nicer to my sisters."
• A pupil in 7F: "Lyfta have definitely change how i look at the world."

These are Year 7 pupils in Rochdale — a town where, as the school notes, many pupils have diverse family backgrounds but limited direct experience of the wider world beyond their immediate community. For many of them, Lyfta is a first consistent encounter with lives from other countries and cultures, presented on their own terms.

The Lead Teacher puts it plainly:

The study spans pupils with SEND and hearing impairment alongside the wider cohort. The form time context, discussion-based and unassessed, appears to create accessible conditions for engagement across the full range of the school community. At Matthew Moss, Lyfta is part of how the whole school starts its day.

Oasis Academy Leesbrook, Oldham

First year, PSHE, and a values-driven trust

Oasis Academy Leesbrook in Oldham serves a diverse community with a clear sense of purpose. Principal Mrs A. Mitchell describes the school's ambition as developing young people who can be "happy and successful citizens, contributing positively to society and championing equality and inclusion." The school's ethos is built around human connection: "Being human is different to being a human being," she writes. "We strive to foster real and lasting relationships."

That grounding makes Lyfta a natural fit. The school is in its first year of using it, embedded within PSHE and form time as part of the wider Oasis Community Learning Trust partnership. The Trust's nine habits, including compassion, humility, hope and consideration, provide the values framework within which Lyfta's human stories do their work.

A Year 7 pupil voice survey of 41 pupils gives a clear early picture. After just a few Lyfta lessons, 97.5% agreed or strongly agreed that Lyfta helps them understand people who live differently to them. 63% said Lyfta helps them imagine themselves in someone else's situation. 44% said it has helped them show more respect or care to others. Only three pupils out of 41 said they had not noticed any change.

What stands out in the open responses is specificity. Pupils reached for something concrete they had seen rather than generalisations about kindness or empathy:

• "We never know someone's backstory."
• "It made me appreciate the things around me more."
• "How hard people's lives can be."

Five teachers rated Lyfta's added value at an average of 8.3 out of 10. All five said they would recommend it to a colleague. Teachers describe Lyfta as opening students' minds to a more global perspective and creating space to think about human challenges that don't otherwise have an obvious home in the timetable.

Leesbrook is a useful early illustration of what is possible when a school's existing values commitments and a tool like Lyfta are genuinely aligned. PSHE and form time, used with intent, are a real route in.

Queen Elizabeth's Girls' School, Barnet

Global Perspectives, critical digital literacy, and students who have agency

At Queen Elizabeth's Girls' School in Barnet, north London, Lyfta sits within a dedicated Global Perspectives course for Year 7. It is a curriculum subject in its own right, delivered every two weeks. The school has integrated Lyfta's Critical Digital and Media Literacy strand as a central thread, using it to explore questions about AI, representation, information and who gets to tell which stories.

The pupil voice from this school is some of the most detailed evidence of what Lyfta can produce when it is used with genuine pedagogical intent.

Zara describes Lyfta as putting on "glasses to a new world." She is precise about why it works:

• "I like how Lyfta doesn't always sugarcoat everything. If it made everything seem happy and good, that's potentially how you would think life is when it's not necessarily always true. I like how it tells you the truth and makes you actually think about things."
• "When you do the 360s, it's showing you the building blocks to your opinion. Then, once you see the video, it shows you the base of that opinion. You don't know the whole story, and once you see the video, your opinion can easily change."

Elissa describes how the stories prompt genuine self-reflection:

• "I look forward to hearing or seeing another person's story. When I hear it, I'm not only thinking about the people around me. It expands your thinking."

Farangis connects it directly to what she's learning about AI:

• "We learned about AI and AGI in Lyfta and Global Perspectives. It said that it could help us with a lot of stuff but could also cause harm, like lying by not showing the whole story."

She also carries with her the memory of a specific story, a boy being forced to leave his village, which has stayed long after the lesson ended.

Keeley puts the global dimension simply:

• "It's fun learning about other people's relationship with the world and the community."

These suggest that human encounters have stayed with the students - rather than being temporary or abstract.

These are Year 7 pupils thinking carefully, in their own register, about authenticity, narrative and what it means to understand someone whose life is very different from theirs. That kind of thinking develops because the content invites it and the teaching creates space for it.

The fortnightly rhythm, combined with structured discussion and the CDML framework, gives pupils time to build a genuine critical vocabulary over the course of a year. The stories accumulate and the thinking deepens.

Upton Court Grammar School, Slough

Three years in, and what consistent use produces

Upton Court Grammar School in Slough has been using Lyfta since 2022. During a visit in November 2025, what was most notable was less the enthusiasm, which was present three years ago, and more what consistent, embedded use had actually produced.

Lyfta is now expected every week as part of the pastoral curriculum. It has moved from innovation to routine, and that move turns out to matter.

Kajal Arora, the Lyfta Lead, describes how the school's Critical Digital and Media Literacy work now sits within a broader AI and digital resilience strategy:

• "The critical digital learning sessions support our wider school strategy around AI and digital literacy. They help students think critically about the benefits and challenges of AI through Lyfta stories, developing the skills they need to navigate the digital landscape."

Pastoral Lead, Anthony Smith, describes a different dimension of the work:

• "When difficult events like the Ukraine war or Gaza conflict affected our community, Lyfta helped us create a safe space where students could engage with different viewpoints... Belonging and inclusion are key themes that Lyfta supports in the pastoral curriculum."
• "The weekly sessions generate conversations that last through the rest of the week."

Upton Court is a diverse, multicultural school, and the role Lyfta plays in creating shared reference points across a student body with very different lived experiences comes through clearly in both staff and student reflections.

The most significant evidence of long-term impact comes from a Year 13 student who was in Year 10 during the 2022 visit. She is now applying to read PPE at Oxford, and she credits Lyfta as one influence on that decision:

• "Lyfta introduced me to different perspectives I wouldn't have encountered otherwise. You can't understand what policy means until you see it in practice."

She describes how a storyworld about a summer and winter village led her to explore non-Western feminist philosophy, and how Lyfta helped her begin to ask structural questions: why are certain worlds available to some people and not others? That is global citizenship in a specific sense — not a list of facts about other countries, but a habit of asking why things are as they are, and for whom.

Year 9 pupils make the same point more concisely.

• "I used to look at things at face value, but now I'm more observant and ask more questions, questions I wouldn't have thought to ask before."
• "It makes global issues feel more real."

Other Year 9 pupils describe discovering jobs, foods and ways of life they had no prior knowledge of. One recalled a storyworld set in an Afghan bakery and the world it opened up — different breads, different traditions, different rhythms of daily work. These are small encounters. Over time, they accumulate into something broader: a genuine sense of the world as larger and more varied than the immediate environment suggests.

Across year groups, students speak clearly about why the 360° experience matters to them:

• "It's told from their voice, not filtered through editing or someone else's viewpoint. You trust them more."

In a school environment where AI-generated content is increasingly present, the authenticity of Lyfta's human stories is something pupils actively value and specifically articulate.

What these four schools have in common

They are genuinely different schools. A large community comprehensive in Rochdale with a high proportion of SEND pupils and one of the highest free school meals rates in the country. A first-year pilot in a values-driven trust in Oldham. A girls' school in north London with a dedicated curriculum subject. A grammar school in Slough three years into embedded practice.

Their students are unique. Their timetables are different. Some of their reasons for choosing Lyfta are different. And yet there are key commonalities in intent, motivation and impact.

Across all four, the same basic sequence keeps appearing. Young people encounter a real human story, someone's actual life, told in their own voice, in their own space. They are given time to think about it. And something shifts: in how they see the world, in how they talk about other people, and in some cases in how they see their own future.

Across all four schools, pupils describe a broadened sense of what the world contains — other lives, other pressures, other ways of organising daily existence — that they did not have before. The crucial thing is helping young people discover any changes in their own thinking, however small, for themselves. This is why Lyfta lesson plans include reflexive and metacognitive learning questions in their design.

Secondary schools and the curriculum question

Secondary schools face a structural challenge that primary schools largely do not. The timetable is organised by subject. Pastoral time is real but often time-restricted and overloaded with other priorities. There is sometimes no obvious home for sustained, reflective, globally-oriented work.

These four schools have found different routes through. Form time is the most common entry point. Matthew Moss and Upton Court both show what becomes possible when that time is used consistently and with purpose. PSHE offers another route, as Leesbrook demonstrates. A dedicated curriculum subject, as at Queen Elizabeth's, is rarer but offers the greatest depth.

Pupils are navigating a world shaped by AI, digital mediation, global instability and contested narratives about whose stories get told and whose matter. The 2025 Curriculum and Assessment Review's call for a more equitable, values-driven curriculum reflects growing recognition that human rights education, global citizenship and critical digital literacy are foundations rather than additions. The policy environment is beginning to align with what these schools have already understood in practice.

What these schools are building, in different ways and at different scales, is what researchers in global learning describe as intercultural competence — the capacity to encounter difference with curiosity rather than anxiety, and to situate one's own experience within a larger human picture. That is harder to measure than a test score. It is also harder to forget.

Matthew Moss High School Year 7 Impact Study, Spring 2026. Oasis-Lyfta Impact Study, 2025. School visit notes and student voice collected 2024 to 2025. Student names from Queen Elizabeth's Girls' School are used with permission. Student voices from other schools are anonymised by year group.