Aila — Oak National Academy's Free AI Lesson-Planning Assistant Enters a National RCT in England

Oak National Academy is an England-based curriculum charity that publishes free, curriculum-aligned lesson resources for schools. In 2024 it launched Aila, a generative-AI assistant that helps teachers adapt Oak's existing lesson plans and slides to their own classes rather than generating content from an open-ended prompt.

By September 2025, Oak reported that 42,610 unique users had downloaded 191,765 lesson resources co-created with Aila, and that 85% of users who completed a lesson plan rated its structure and content as fairly or very high quality. These adoption and satisfaction figures are self-reported by the tool's own developer and have not been independently verified.

To test the underlying claims rigorously, the Education Endowment Foundation commissioned the National Foundation for Educational Research (NFER) to run a school-randomised 'Teacher Choices' trial: around 450 Key Stage 2 teachers across 86 primary schools are randomly assigned to plan lessons with or without Aila over one term (autumn 2025 to spring 2026), with workload measured through weekly time diaries and lesson quality judged by an independent panel blinded to which group produced each resource. Full results are due in autumn 2026. The design mirrors EEF's earlier trial of ChatGPT for science lesson preparation, which found a 31% reduction in planning time with no measurable difference in lesson quality.

Because Aila's adoption and quality figures to date are self-reported and the independent RCT has not yet reported results, current evidence for its impact on learning or teaching quality remains descriptive and pre-trial rather than experimentally confirmed.

Read the full analysis: https://www.thenational.academy/blog/how-is-aila-impacting-teacher-lesson-planning-practices-workload-and-expertise-early-insights