The Meta Method is The Elephant Group's programme for building the essential skills every young person needs to succeed, whatever success looks like for them.
At its core, it teaches metacognition: simply put, how to learn. Students get practical tools to plan their work, manage their time, their behaviours, and work out what's helping them improve and what isn't. These are the skills that sit underneath every grade, every qualification and every next step: GCSEs, sixth form, apprenticeships, university, or employment.
Metacognition sounds complicated, but the idea behind it is simple: understanding how we think and learn. It means being able to recognise what's working, what isn’t, and what we can do differently to improve.
It isn’t a subject in its own right; instead, metacognition underpins many of the skills we need to succeed, from revision and problem-solving to organisation, communication and self-management. Crucially, it helps young people become more independent learners, giving them practical strategies they can use rather than simply telling them to “work harder” or “revise more”.
Metacognition can benefit young people at every stage and every level. A student working towards a pass at GCSE and a student preparing to apply to Oxford or Cambridge may be facing very different challenges, but both benefit from knowing how to plan, manage their time, respond when something isn’t working and choose the right approach for the task ahead.
That is what The Meta Method is designed to develop: we teach these skills explicitly and give students regular opportunities to practise and apply them, helping effective approaches become habits. The result is a set of skills students can take with them into different subjects, further study, university, employment, and beyond.
The Meta Method takes the principles of metacognition and makes them practical and accessible for students. We teach three core principles: Know Yourself, Know Your Task and Know Your Strategies, and connect these with the metacognitive cycle of planning, monitoring and evaluating.
Know Yourself: Understand yourself as a learner. Recognise your strengths, habits and preferences, identify where you might need to adapt, and build the self-awareness to make better decisions about your learning.
Know Your Task: Understand what you're being asked to do and what success looks like. Learn to break down complex tasks, identify what they require and make informed decisions about the best way to approach them.
Know Your Strategies: Build a toolkit of effective learning, study and revision strategies, but importantly, learn when and why to use them. Students explore different approaches and learn to select the right strategy for themselves and the task in front of them.
Students also need to be able to put that knowledge into action, which is where planning, monitoring and evaluating come in.
Students learn to plan an approach using what they know about themselves, the task and the strategies available to them; monitor how well that approach is working and reflect on whether another strategy or tool might support them better; and evaluate the outcome so they can decide what to repeat, change or improve next time.
Over time, this becomes a cycle: understand, plan, try, reflect, adapt. The aim is to help students become increasingly confident and independent learners who know what to do when learning gets difficult, rather than relying on someone else to tell them.
The Meta Method supports young people at every stage of their journey:
Years 7–11: Elephant Success. A sustained programme of two sessions per year group per year, building metacognitive skills, academic confidence, goal setting and communication from the very beginning of secondary school.
Years 12–13: The Meta Method Revision Series. A four-session programme developing metacognitive revision skills ahead of A Levels, BTECs and university applications. Focuses on self-awareness, strategy selection and independent learning.
University students: Transition support and study skills. For students entering higher education, particularly those from state school backgrounds who may not have been explicitly taught how to learn independently.
Employability skills for all: A direct answer to the skills gap. We partner with schools, employers, universities and industry partners to bring meta schools to students of all capabilities and aspirations, developing self-regulation, communication, problem solving and workplace readiness.
The Meta Method is flexible, bespoke and built around your priorities. Core session topics include:
Sessions can be:
You can choose a single session, a short programme, or a sustained multi-year programme that embeds metacognitive practice across your school or university.
We would be delighted to explore how the Meta Method could support your existing priorities and contribute to your wider goals.
For schools:
One-off webinars, assemblies or press-and-play sessions | Teacher CPD and training | Bespoke programme content for Years 7–13 | Sustained Elephant Success programme.
For universities and HEIs:
Bespoke metacognition support aligned to your APP requirements | Wraparound sessions for widening participation outreach | Transition support for incoming students.
For employers & industry partners:
Bring the Meta Method into your partner schools across your region | Named sponsorship of school or university programmes | Evidenced social value for ESG and PPN 026 procurement reporting | Bespoke impact reporting to demonstrate Skills and Good Jobs outcomes.
