New AI-powered lesson planning tool launched and could ‘give teachers their Sunday nights back’

Oak National Academy has launched its AI-powered lesson planning tool. The artificial intelligence (AI) lesson assistant, Aila, enables teachers to create personalised lesson plans and resources in minutes, saving them hours each week. It is simple to use and free for all teachers to access.

Aila’s launch comes as efforts are stepped up to recruit and retain more teachers. Workload is cited as a major contributing factor to teachers deciding to leave the profession. Full-time teachers work, on average, 52 hours a week, and 48 per cent report that they spend ‘too much time’ on individual lesson planning.

Teachers who have tested Aila report that it could save them up to 3 and a half hours a week with planning their lessons, on average. 

Aila is the UK’s first publicly-funded generative AI tool for mass use. It exemplifies the government’s approach to AI in education, drawing on curated high-quality content to support lesson planning without compromising quality and safety. Rachel Reeves, the chancellor, has put AI at the heart of the government’s agenda to deliver change and better outcomes for the public.

Teachers direct and guide Aila, using their expertise to create fully resourced lessons in any national curriculum subject. Through an intuitive step-by-step process, they can steer Aila to make resources that match the needs of their class, location or preferred approach.

A geography lesson, for example, can be tailored to a local landmark, the literacy level of the resources Aila produces can be amended according to pupil need and extra activities can be added within seconds.

Evidence suggests teachers remain concerned about the accuracy, bias and safety of AI, an obstacle to their use in education and beyond. Until now, generative AI tools have used large datasets from the internet for their content, sometimes drawing on materials that are incorrect or unsuitable for use in the classroom.

These tools do not understand the context of what needs to be taught in English schools, best practice for how to teach children and they don’t create content that a teacher can easily use in the classroom.

Wherever possible, Aila pulls content from Oak’s existing curriculum resources, each created and checked by teachers to ensure their accuracy. Developers also helped the tool understand the national curriculum and create resources that are ready for teachers to use. Aila creates lesson plans, teacher slides, pupil quizzes, pupil worksheets with practice tasks and more.

While still in ‘beta phase’, Aila has already been tested by thousands of teachers. The public release will see Oak gather much greater feedback as it looks to keep improving its cutting-edge technology. Oak will continually evaluate Aila to check the quality and performance of the resources generated.

Pepe Di’Iasio, general secretary of the Association of School and College Leaders, said: “We are facing a severe shortage in the teaching workforce. We want to recruit an extra 6,500 teachers into the classroom. To achieve this we need to make teaching a realistic, attainable and attractive job.

“Developments such as Oak’s AI lesson assistant will help us achieve that, and give teachers their Sunday nights back.”

Avril Ritchie, deputy headteacher at Bedford Drive Primary School in Birkenhead, said: “Using AI to support my planning and teaching wasn’t something I’d really considered until I came across Aila.

“To say I was blown away would be an understatement! Aila could save me four to six hours per week. Lessons are created in minutes and can be personalised in so many ways, I can’t wait to see the impact this has on teaching moving forward.”

Oak is also supporting the wider commercial market to innovate and create safe AI tools and teaching products. Oak’s code, including Aila, is open source. Oak is developing an Application Programming Interface (API) to allow companies to build off, adapt or integrate any of Oak’s content into their existing offers, or create brand-new products. This is possible because Oak’s new teaching resources are published on an open licence.

To kickstart this innovation, Oak is hosting its first public Hackathon in central London on October 22-23. Any publisher, ed-tech organisation, interested teacher, or AI enthusiast can apply to join and start experimenting with building new tools using Oak’s content.

John Roberts, director of product and engineering at Oak National Academy, said: “Aila, Oak’s beta AI-powered lesson assistant, is our first step to unleashing teachers’ creativity through this technology, allowing them to create personalised lesson plans and resources in minutes.

“They can do this safely in the knowledge it’s drawing on Oak’s teacher-made, high-quality content. This cutting-edge tech shows the potential of leading AI innovation to improve education and public services.”