SOAR: personalised online learning that teaches your child how to learn

What is SOAR?

SOAR is Performance Learning’s adaptive online learning platform. It sits at the heart of the Performance Learning approach, giving your child a personalised learning experience based on their own learning priorities, which are identified by the Foresight assessment.

Rather than re-teaching subject content, SOAR teaches students of all abilities how to learn, retain and recall the information that matters most on exam day. In just a few minutes each day, your child builds the learning behaviours that support progress across their subjects.

How does SOAR work?

SOAR works in three stages.

1. Foresight assessment. Your child starts with the full Foresight assessment, included in the subscription. It looks at learning behaviours, mental health and wellbeing, and progress and attainment factors such as recall.
2. Personalised pathways. Foresight’s results provide the framework for the most appropriate learning pathways in SOAR, so your child works on the areas that will make the biggest difference to them.
3. Monthly progress monitoring. Progress is checked every month, helping your child stay on track and build lasting learning habits.

Your child also has on-demand coaching support at every step. They can improve independently without being left to work everything out alone.

What does SOAR cover?

SOAR’s personalised courses focus on the skills and habits behind exam performance, including:

• Retention and recall: organising, remembering and retrieving information under exam conditions
• Time management: planning revision and keeping on top of workload
• Exam stress and anxiety: practical strategies for staying calm and in control
• Sleep and energy: the everyday habits that affect focus and memory
• Attitudes and behaviours to learning: motivation, confidence and how your child approaches challenges

Lessons cover topics such as sleep and wellbeing, learning heavy-text subjects, establishing strengths and weaknesses, and everyday mindfulness to help your child manage their feelings and thoughts at any time of day.

Because these skills apply to every subject, SOAR complements the teaching your child gets at school and any tutoring they already have.

Why a few minutes a day?

Little and often beats long, last-minute sessions. Dr Tej Samani, who created the Performance Learning approach, has long championed the spacing effect: coming back to information over time so it sticks. As he explained to the Financial Times, to remember the date 1066 you might write it on a Post-it note on your bedroom window.

SOAR asks for just a few minutes each day, so learning becomes a habit rather than another source of pressure. Your child keeps building skills steadily through the term instead of trying to cram them in before exams.

What’s included for £10 a month?

Included	What it means for your child
Full Foresight assessment	A complete profile of how your child learns, with reports you can act on
Unlimited access to SOAR	Use the platform as often as they need to
Personalised learning pathways	Lessons matched to your child’s Foresight results
On-demand coaching	Support whenever they need it, at every step
Monthly progress monitoring	Regular checks to keep them on track

Who is SOAR for?

SOAR suits children who can work independently and benefit from little-and-often practice, from primary school to sixth form. That includes students getting ready for GCSE and A level exams who want to revise more effectively, not just for longer.

It is a good fit if:

• you want ongoing support between now and exams, not a one-off session
• your child prefers to learn at their own pace
• you want an affordable way to act on the Foresight results every week
• you want to see, month by month, how your child is progressing

If your child needs more structure or live contact, the Virtual Classroom with PL adds two live small-group masterclasses for £295. Academic Transformation with Dr Tej includes access to SOAR between one-to-one sessions with Dr Tej Samani.

Do schools use SOAR?

Yes. Schools and trusts use Foresight and SOAR together: Foresight gives staff the insight into how each pupil feels about learning, and SOAR delivers a personalised learning pathway for every pupil. Read more about Performance Learning for schools.

What is the research behind SOAR?

SOAR is the result of more than a decade of research and development led by Dr Tej Samani. His peer-reviewed work includes a 2017 paper on bridging the gap between high and low performing pupils through Performance Learning online analysis and curricula, presented at the International Conference on Artificial Intelligence in Education.

Students using Performance Learning improved by an average of 2.4 grades against their predicted grades (Thomas et al., 2024, an analysis of 940 students led by Birkbeck’s Centre for Educational Neuroscience). See the full list of papers on our research page.