Oak National Academy's Aila: the lesson planning tool built specifically for UK schools

If you've been waiting for an AI tool that's actually been designed with UK schools in mind — rather than adapted from a generic American platform — Aila might be exactly what you've been looking for. It's free, it's publicly funded, and it was built specifically for the English national curriculum.

What is Aila?

Aila is Oak National Academy's AI-powered lesson planning assistant. Oak — if you don't know it — is the publicly funded digital curriculum resource used by thousands of UK schools. During Covid, Oak became the backbone of remote learning for many primary schools. Since then, it's evolved into one of the most comprehensive free curriculum resources available to UK teachers.

Aila launched in September 2024 and is the first publicly funded generative AI tool available to UK teachers. It's free to use, it draws on Oak's library of curriculum-aligned content, and it's been built with a level of safety and safeguarding consideration that most commercial tools simply don't match.

What it actually does

Aila helps teachers plan lessons and create resources — but in a way that's specifically aligned to the national curriculum in England. You describe the lesson you want to plan (year group, subject, learning objectives) and Aila guides you through building it, suggesting activities, starter tasks, explanations, and assessments.

Crucially, it draws on Oak's existing library of teacher-reviewed content before pulling from the wider internet. That means outputs are more likely to be curriculum-appropriate and age-right than if you'd asked a general AI tool the same question.

Teachers involved in early testing reported saving around 3–4 hours per week on lesson planning. The Education Endowment Foundation is currently running a full randomised controlled trial to measure the impact properly — which tells you something about the seriousness with which Oak is approaching this.

The safety story

This is where Aila genuinely stands out. Oak has published detailed information about its four-layer safety approach — including input threat detection, content moderation by an independent AI agent, and clear categorisation of what the tool will and won't produce. Topics that require complete accuracy (first aid, specific laws) are flagged as off-limits. Inappropriate content is blocked.

For a primary school headteacher or SBM worried about AI safety, the fact that a government-backed organisation has done this level of due diligence is genuinely reassuring.

Who it's for

Aila is primarily a tool for classroom teachers — it's focused on lesson planning and resource creation, not admin or leadership tasks. If your biggest workload pain is in the classroom, it's well worth exploring. If your school's biggest need is admin, communications, and governance support, you'll want to combine it with other tools.

How to try it

Aila is available free at thenational.academy. There's no subscription, no setup, and no cost. It's one of the simplest first steps a primary school can take into AI-supported teaching.

What using it actually feels like

The experience of using Aila is genuinely different from using a general AI tool. When you ask ChatGPT to help with a lesson, you get something generic that needs significant work to become classroom-ready. When you use Aila, you're working within a tool that understands the structure of a lesson, the progression of learning, and the national curriculum — because it's been trained on Oak's existing library of teacher-reviewed content.

In practice, that means the lesson plans it produces feel like something a good colleague gave you rather than something a computer generated. The learning objectives make sense, the activities build on each other, and the vocabulary is appropriate for the year group. You still need to review it and make it yours — but you're starting from a much better place.

The EEF trial — what it means for schools

The fact that the Education Endowment Foundation is running a full randomised controlled trial on Aila is worth paying attention to. The EEF doesn't commission trials on tools it doesn't think have genuine promise, and an RCT is the gold standard for educational evidence.

For schools that are cautious about AI — and there are good reasons to be cautious — the EEF involvement is a meaningful signal. This isn't a tech company making claims about time savings. This is the UK's leading education evidence body putting proper research behind it.

The results of the trial should give the sector the clearest picture yet of what AI-assisted lesson planning actually delivers in UK primary classrooms. That's genuinely valuable for everyone making decisions about AI in schools right now.

What using it actually feels like

The experience of using Aila is genuinely different from using a general AI tool. When you ask ChatGPT to help with a lesson, you get something generic that needs significant work to become classroom-ready. When you use Aila, you're working within a tool that understands the structure of a lesson, the progression of learning, and the national curriculum — because it's been trained on Oak's existing library of teacher-reviewed content.

In practice, that means the lesson plans it produces feel like something a good colleague gave you rather than something a computer generated. The learning objectives make sense, the activities build on each other, and the vocabulary is appropriate for the year group. You still need to review it and make it yours — but you're starting from a much better place.

The EEF trial — what it means for schools

The fact that the Education Endowment Foundation is running a full randomised controlled trial on Aila is worth paying attention to. The EEF doesn't commission trials on tools it doesn't think have genuine promise, and an RCT is the gold standard for educational evidence.

For schools that are cautious about AI — and there are good reasons to be cautious — the EEF involvement is a meaningful signal. This isn't a tech company making claims about time savings. This is the UK's leading education evidence body putting proper research behind it.

The results of the trial should give the sector the clearest picture yet of what AI-assisted lesson planning actually delivers in UK primary classrooms. That's genuinely valuable for everyone making decisions about AI in schools right now.