Your top 5 questions about Aila, our AI lesson assistant, answered.

Over 30,000 teachers have used Aila, our AI lesson assistant, to support them to create lesson plans and teaching resources in its first 6 months.

We’ve loved hearing your feedback and questions about Aila at school visits, conferences and in our webinars.

Here’s a round-up of the top 5 questions we’re hearing from you:

1. Is Aila free and can anyone use it?

Yes, as with all of Oak's resources, Aila is completely free to use!

Aila is designed for teachers in UK schools and is aligned with the national curriculum for England. If you live outside the UK, you can sign up for a demo account, which enables you to produce three lesson plans.

2. Does Aila only take from resources on Oak National Academy? Can it help me if I need to prepare a lesson on a topic that is not already on Oak or listed in the national curriculum?

Aila uses an AI technique called Retrieval Augmented Generation (RAG) that allows us to prioritise where it draws content from. The first place Aila looks when creating a lesson plan is in Oak’s high-quality curriculum plans and teaching resources. These resources have been carefully and expertly created by real-life teachers and quality-checked by subject experts. This reduces the chance of hallucinations or bias, helping Aila to produce resources which are accurate, safe and aligned to the national curriculum.

If you are planning a lesson on a topic that is outside of the national curriculum, Aila will still look within the large language model it uses (currently GPT-4o), so it will still be able to find content to help you plan your lesson.

All of Aila’s lessons benefit from the detailed prompts we have written outlining best practices within the education and cognitive science fields. We have also put a number of safety guardrails in place to ensure safe lesson creation. This means that even if you’re planning a lesson outside of the national curriculum, Aila will work to ensure it is safe and high-quality. For example, we provide additional teacher guidance if you are planning lessons on sensitive topics such as contraception or the Holocaust. Read more about Aila’s safety guardrails.

We have also developed an auto-evaluation tool (a tool that uses AI to judge the quality of AI-generated content) to constantly evaluate the quality of Aila’s AI-generated lessons. Read more about this in our blog and our paper published by MIT Open Learning.

3. Can I upload my own documents into Aila?

You cannot currently upload any documents into Aila. You can however copy and paste specific definitions, learning outcomes, practice tasks or model answers that you have previously written and include these into your lesson. It is your responsibility to ensure that you hold the copyright for this content. You should never upload any personal information (about you or your students) into Aila or any other AI tool e.g. an EHCP.

4. Can I create personalised lessons with Aila, for example, to support SEND or EAL students?

Of course - this is exactly why we created Aila. You can prompt Aila to factor in your pupils’ needs when generating your lesson plan.

Try asking Aila to produce texts for different reading ages, sentence starters, or use the additional materials section of the lesson to ask Aila to suggest alternative activities

You could also ask Aila to translate your keywords into another language to support pupils who speak English as a second language.

Read more about what you can ask Aila to do or watch our webinar recording on how to plan high-quality, personalised lessons with Aila.

5. Does my lesson that I plan get saved in Aila so that I can access it at any time?

Yes, simply click ‘menu’ in the top right-hand corner of your browser, and your lesson history will be displayed.

It’s worth noting that when you change or update a lesson from the lesson history tab, it will be permanently changed. You can’t see previous versions of the same lesson.

Find out more

Join me for a webinar 'integrating AI into your teaching practices - tips and tricks for the summer term and beyond' on Wednesday 7th May, 4 - 5pm.

We'll cover:

• Suggestions and ideas for using Aila, our AI lesson assistant, to help your students prepare for their exams.
• When and how to use Aila to save you valuable lesson planning time.
• How you can use Aila to support your curriculum planning for the next academic year.

And if you haven’t yet had the opportunity to explore Aila, why not take a look and see how it could help you today.

Still have questions about Aila? Read our full FAQs or get in touch with us at help@thenational.academy, and we’ll be happy to help.

You might also be interested in:

• Webinar recording: How to harness the potential of AI in your school
• Webinar recording: How to plan high-quality, personalised lessons with Aila
• How do we ensure our AI-generated resources are high-quality?
• Understanding the ‘Ai’ in Aila
• The pedagogical thinking behind Aila, our AI lesson planning tool
• 8 things you won’t believe our AI lesson planning tool can do
• Aila’s safety guardrails explained