Aila

Aila is Oak National Academy's AI lesson assistant. A teacher describes the lesson they want and Aila writes the full set of resources: a lesson plan, a slide deck, two quizzes and a worksheet, all grounded in Oak's own curriculum rather than whatever the model happens to remember. It went into public beta in September 2024 as the first publicly funded generative AI tool open to the public in the UK, and by September 2025 it had 42,610 users and 191,765 co-created resources.

The grounding is the interesting part. Around 10,000 Oak lessons are vectorised and retrieved to anchor what the model writes, a separate moderation model checks the output, and an open-sourced evaluation pipeline uses a model as judge to score quality. The whole codebase is public under an MIT licence: a Next.js and TypeScript monorepo on Postgres with pgvector. Oak's research found teachers saving about three and a half hours a week, and 85% rated the output quality high in the first two months.

I went back to Oak to work on it, inside the engineering team, and was its second-largest contributor, with 144 commits between August 2024 and May 2025.