Godolphin & Latymer was asking a bigger question about education. What would help its students thrive long after they'd left school?

The school did something rather bold. It made room on the timetable for a different kind of learning, introducing a two-year Innovation and Leadership course that students could choose in place of a GCSE.

The curriculum was in place. Students were already tackling real-world challenges. But teaching the programme brought a new set of questions into focus.

What does good leadership actually look like in a classroom? How do you help young people develop it? And how do you assess innovation when an unsuccessful experiment might reveal more learning than a brilliant final presentation?

Godolphin wanted answers that could stand up to its educational standards.

That's where BehaviourStudio came in.

There was something interesting happening inside the projects.

Put a group of students together to solve an unfamiliar problem and human behaviour becomes part of the work.

Ideas get defended before they've been tested. Someone spots something everyone else has missed. A group changes direction because one person asks a better question.

These moments contain opportunities to develop the very capabilities the programme was created to teach.

We saw a way to bring behavioural science into the experience of learning itself.

Students could investigate why people behave as they do, while becoming more aware of their own decisions and responses. Leadership and innovation could become things they deliberately practised during their projects.

That thinking shaped everything we designed.

Give students something to work with.

We began with the moments when students need to decide what to do next.

A project has gone off course. The group is stuck. The evidence points somewhere unexpected.

We created a Student Handbook to help students find their bearings and make useful choices as the work unfolds.

Within it, Ways of Working gives students different approaches to draw on. They can recognise when a problem needs fresh thinking, when a discussion needs moving forward or when it's time to put an idea to the test.

We also wanted to give students some room to experiment with themselves.

Ways of Showing Up turns that idea into a personal mixing desk. Students choose a behaviour they'd like to turn up by just 1%, then try it in the middle of a real situation.

A little more courage to share an unfinished thought. An extra question before making a judgement.

Small experiments that make the connection between behaviour and experience easier to discover.

We kept this personal exploration outside formal assessment. Students needed space to notice their habits and try different responses on their own terms.

The behavioural design toolkit extends the same thinking into the subject itself. It gives students methods for investigating what people actually do, understanding the conditions influencing their choices and developing ideas they can test.

Together, the resources bring behavioural science into the decisions students make throughout their projects.

And give teachers something worth noticing.

For Godolphin, the other half of the challenge was assessment.

Leadership can be easy to recognise when someone confidently takes charge. It can be harder to spot in the student who listens carefully, brings someone into a conversation or helps a group abandon an idea that isn't working.

We wanted the assessment to recognise those contributions.

So we developed a behavioural framework grounded in what students actually do during project work.

Teachers can identify a particular behaviour to look for, capture a few meaningful examples and use shared criteria to make a judgement about progress. That judgement leads to practical feedback and another opportunity for the student to develop.

The approach was deliberately designed for the realities of teaching. It needed to provide credible evidence across a two-year programme while remaining manageable in a busy classroom.

Alongside it, the Try / Use / Lead Stage System gives students a way to recognise their increasing independence with the programme's tools.

The result connects the learning students experience with the progress teachers need to recognise.

An ambitious idea, made teachable.

Godolphin had created the space for a different kind of education.

Our work gave that ambition a behavioural learning approach, supported by original student resources and a framework for teachers.

The handbook helps students navigate unfamiliar challenges. The tools give them ways to practise. The assessment gives teachers a shared basis for recognising development over time.

And running through it all is the idea that made this project so interesting to us:

The way students work on a problem can become part of what they learn from it.

"A testimonial about the experience by the team at Swoboba"

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