Take the new Structural Learning platform for a test drive. Build your first lesson in four minutes, see how Map It, Build It, and Say It give children three ways to think, and find out how the planning surface saves teachers an hour a week.
For years, the gap between a teacher's planning time and what actually happens in lessons has grown wider. You write a plan on Sunday evening, then on Monday morning you stand in front of thirty children and adapt the whole thing on the fly. The plan rarely survives first contact with the classroom.
We built the new Structural Learning platform to close that gap. It turns the way teachers already think about good lessons into something tangible, shareable, and quick to set up. This week, we are inviting you to take it for a test drive. You can sign up for free, build your first lesson in about four minutes, and see whether it earns a place in your week.
When we ran workshops with primary and secondary teachers across the UK, the same complaint came up again and again. Everyone knows what a strong lesson looks like. It draws on prior knowledge, gives children something thinking-rich to do, and ends with the children able to talk about what they have learned. The trouble is finding the time to plan one when there are thirty books to mark, three meetings, and a phone call from a parent waiting.
So we asked a different question. What if the planning surface itself nudged you towards a stronger lesson, rather than leaving you to remember everything from your training? That question became the platform. Every screen is built on the assumption that you have ten minutes, not two hours. Good lesson planning should not be a luxury reserved for the school holidays.
The lesson wizard walks you through four short questions. You drop in your topic, pick the year group, name the concepts you want children to grapple with, and choose the activities. The whole thing takes less time than waiting for the kettle.
Behind the scenes, the platform is doing the part that usually takes a teacher an hour. It is checking that the activities match the concepts, that the vocabulary is at the right level, and that the lesson has a clear arc from prior knowledge to new understanding. You stay in the driving seat, but the cognitive load drops sharply.
You begin with a single screen. Type in the topic, the year group, and the curriculum link. The platform pulls up a starter set of concepts that fit your subject, drawn from our concept-based learning library. You can keep them, swap them, or write your own.
If you teach Year 5 history, for example, you might be planning a lesson on the Battle of Hastings. The platform suggests concepts like causation, change, and perspective. You pick two, and the rest of the lesson is built around helping children think with those ideas, not just memorise dates.
This is where the platform earns its keep. Children rarely think their best when they are doing the same thing for the whole lesson, so we built three modes. Map It uses visual graphic organisers like Venn diagrams, flowcharts, and concept maps to help children sort and connect ideas. Build It uses physical or visual construction tasks, where children sequence cards, build a model, or draw a diagram to make their thinking visible.
Say It uses structured oracy routines. Children get sentence stems, a partner, a timer, and a clear talk move to practise. Each mode produces something a teacher can see, mark, and use as evidence of learning. That visibility is what closes the loop for both children and adults.
Once you have answered the four questions, the platform generates the lesson view. You see a clean page with the learning intention, a key vocabulary panel, the activity instructions written in child-friendly language, and a teacher's notes column down the side. Nothing on the page is generic. It has been written for the topic, year group, and concepts you chose.
If you do not like a section, you can edit it inline or regenerate just that block. Most teachers tell us they only tweak one or two things before printing.
You can print the lesson, export it as a PDF for your planning folder, or download it as a slide deck for the whiteboard. There is also an option to export a child-facing booklet so each pupil gets their own version of the worksheet. Everything stays in your account, so the lesson is there next year when the same topic comes around.
Children get more of the kind of lesson they remember. They are sorting, building, or talking, rather than copying from a board. They are using the same vocabulary the teacher uses, because the platform pre-loads the key terms. They have a clearer sense of what they are meant to think about, because the activity is matched to the concept rather than to the topic alone.
The Map It, Build It, Say It rhythm also gives quieter children a way in. Some of them find it easier to draw their thinking before they say it out loud. Others need to handle a card before they can write a sentence. The platform makes those routes legitimate, not a special case.
Adults get planning time back, and the lessons they teach are more consistent in quality. New teachers in particular tell us the platform feels like a quiet mentor sitting next to them, suggesting what tends to work. Heads of department use it to share a common house style across the team, so cover lessons no longer feel like a lottery.
For senior leaders, the dashboard shows which concepts are being taught across the school and which are missing. That gives curriculum conversations something concrete to start from. The aim is never to replace teacher judgement. The aim is to give teacher judgement better tools.
The platform is free to try, and you do not need a card to start. Sign up, build one lesson for a class you are teaching this week, and let us know how it lands. If something is missing, tell us. The platform changes most weeks based on what teachers say.
Your next step: pick a lesson you are dreading planning, and use the wizard for that one. Four minutes from now, you will know whether this saves you time or not.
