John Roberts is the Chief Executive of Oak National Academy, an NGO publicly funded by England's Department for Education to build a free, fully digitised national curriculum for England's schools. A former secondary school teacher and senior leader in the North West of England, he built his first reputation outside the classroom by founding Edapt in 2011, an independent edu-legal support service for teachers and school staff, where he remains chair.

In April 2020, as COVID closed schools overnight, Roberts helped launch Oak as an emergency remote-learning platform — going from a WhatsApp conversation to a live site in 12 days, delivering over 130 million lessons between April 2020 and July 2021. He joined initially as Director of Product and Engineering before becoming CEO. Under his leadership, Oak evolved into what he calls the world's first fully digitised, machine-readable national curriculum: 13,000 lessons and roughly 100,000 resources across all 17 National Curriculum subjects, now used by one in three teachers in England. In September 2024, Oak launched Aila, England's first publicly available generative AI tool, now used by more than 60,000 teachers to plan lessons grounded in Oak's own openly licensed curriculum data.

In this episode, John talks with Svenia Busson about:

  • Why Oak scaled from a pandemic emergency platform into England's official digitised curriculum
  • The case for openly licensing school content under the UNESCO 2019 Recommendation on OER
  • Building Aila — and the safety and quality failures (Americanisms, guessable multiple-choice distractors, chatbot risk around sensitive texts like Romeo and Juliet) that shaped its design
  • Why grounding AI in a rich curriculum corpus, including full lesson transcripts, beats one-shot lesson generation
  • Cognitive outsourcing vs. cognitive offloading — keeping teachers in the loop on lesson planning
  • What Oak's open misconception datasets and curriculum knowledge graph (published on GitHub) enable for other builders, and how they compare to efforts like Eedi's misconceptions research with Google DeepMind
  • Why public digital infrastructure, not just AI models, is the missing layer in ed-tech — from the US's philanthropically funded Learning Commons to Anthropic's MCP standard
  • Open questions ahead: faster evaluation methods, the pending NFER/EEF evaluation of Aila, and England's 2028 curriculum change


Find out more about knowledge graphs: https://www.tes.com/magazine/analysis/general/why-ai-gets-lesson-planning-wrong-and-how-fix-it

Mentioned in this episode:

Education Futures Fellowship

A six-week programme starting on September 22nd, where seven world-leading experts in developmental psychology, neuroscience, and AI child safety will share everything they know with you: educationfutures.ai/fellowship.

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