Above: celebrating Talamo’s Innovate UK Create Growth award.

In August 2025, we heard that Talamo had won funding from Innovate UK through its Create Growth Programme. The grant supported the research and development behind our Executive Function assessment, which schools can now use alongside our Cognitive & Dyslexia and Maths & Dyscalculia assessments.

Here’s what the programme is, why we chose executive function, and how the assessment was built.

What is Create Growth?

Create Growth is funded by the Department for Culture, Media and Sport (DCMS) and run by Innovate UK. It supports high-growth creative businesses with funding and business support, so they can scale and reach their potential.

We applied to the programme’s fourth competition, for larger projects, in spring 2025, and heard that we had been successful that August. The project ran until the end of March 2026. As part of the programme, we also joined a cohort of businesses supported by Innovate UK Business Growth.

Why executive function?

Executive functions are the thinking skills that help pupils stay focused, hold back an impulse, switch between tasks, keep information in mind and plan ahead. They matter for learning and for managing everyday school life, and they develop a great deal through childhood and adolescence.

Yet schools have had few classroom-friendly ways to measure these skills directly. Identification usually relies on observation, which shows how difficulties look in class but not what sits underneath them. We wanted to give schools objective evidence to support earlier identification, better-targeted support and clearer referral decisions.

How we built it

The assessment was developed in three stages.

• Pilot. Between January and March 2026, we piloted nine tasks with 238 pupils in 14 schools. Every task was checked item by item for reliability, validity and how well it tracked age.

• Refinement. Two tasks from earlier versions were replaced because the pilot data didn’t support them. A task only keeps its place while the evidence backs it.

• Standardisation. The norms were built from 560 pupils in 13 schools across England in spring 2026, with every age from 7 to 16 represented.

In the pilot, reliability ranged from 0.84 to 0.98 across the measures where it can be estimated. Thank you to every school, teacher and pupil who took part.

What the assessment measures

Pupils complete short tasks on a school device with headphones. Each task opens with spoken instructions and practice items, and the whole assessment takes about 35 to 45 minutes, which can be split across sittings. A teacher or teaching assistant can supervise it, and no specialist qualification is needed.

The results build a profile across six areas:

• sustained attention

• inhibitory control

• cognitive flexibility

• executive planning

• working memory

• processing speed

From Arthur Brown’s sample report. Arthur is a fictional pupil.

Each report shows the pupil’s profile, an executive function challenges indicator, a Level of Need and practical support recommendations. The assessment measures how a pupil performs on executive function tasks. It isn’t a diagnostic tool, and its reports never use diagnostic labels.

You can look through full examples in our sample reports.

Thank you

We’re grateful to Innovate UK and DCMS for backing the project, and to the schools that helped us test every task. If you’d like to see how it could work in your school, explore the Executive Function assessment.