In his last job, Fred was sometimes up until past midnight preparing lesson plans and presentations for the next day. Now he’s well-rested, with more energy to spend inspiring the kids in his classroom. He’s still in charge of planning his lessons, making sure they’re right for his students. But the heavy lifting is done by AI.

Millie, Fred and Mrs Roberts are fictionalised characters who represent real people. But in most classrooms in the world right now, their experiences would be beyond imagination.

The paperwork challenge for modern teaching

Education resists change. Outside the school gates, pupils can access all the information in the world in the palm of their hand, and dream of jobs that didn’t even exist when they started formal education. Inside school, things are slower to evolve. A Victorian schoolteacher who dropped through a time warp into an average 21st century classroom wouldn’t have much trouble knowing what to do.

Nadim Nsouli is on a mission to change that. The Lebanese-British businessman is the founder and Chief Executive of Inspired Education, the world’s leading premium private school provider. From a standing start in 2013, Inspired now operates over a hundred schools across 24 countries, from Ho Chi Minh City to Rio de Janeiro. On any given school day, some 8,000 teachers are teaching over 90,000 pupils in its classrooms.  

After a successful career in law, investment banking and private equity, Nadim entered the world of education with an ambition to take a fresh approach to schools, rethinking traditional approaches to the curriculum and pedagogy. In short, preparing students for 21st century life by teaching them with 21st century methods and tools.

Nadim explains, ‘The driving force behind the creation of Inspired Education was my vision to unite the world’s best schools under one banner, facilitating the sharing of global best practices while preserving each school’s unique identity and values. I took the leap from private equity to schools because I wanted to create a schools group designed to nurture well-rounded individuals who are not only academically accomplished but also confident and capable leaders. Our motto, “Embracing Individuality. Preparing Leaders,” reflects this holistic approach.’

Enter the Inspired Global Study platform

In 2019, well before LLMs became mainstream and even before Covid introduced a generation of parents and children to online lessons, Inspired set about preparing the ground for the deployment of AI in their schools. 

A key driver of this was Torben Lundberg, a straight-talking Dane with over 20 years’ experience in IT management, who joined Inspired as Chief Information Officer. The company developed a modern Azure-based data platform across their schools that linked all pupil, parent and teacher data relating to teaching, learning and school administration: from individual children’s grades and progress, to company-wide finance and HR systems. For a lot of sectors, putting all your data on a single platform is a no-brainer. For a group of schools, it was a world first.

In May 2021, Inspired acquired the online-only school InterHigh and combined it with its own virtual offering, King’s College Online. These pioneering schools allowed pupils to access a virtual education from anywhere in the world. Torben and his colleagues took that expertise and built it out into a proprietary online learning platform - the Inspired Global Study platform - that would work for students in any of its schools. It complements the world-class teaching in Inspired’s classrooms with the wraparound benefits of remote learning, so that pupils can easily catch up on missed lessons, access additional content and stretch material, and submit homework assignments. Crucially, it also helps parents support their children by giving them fine-grained information on what the kids are doing and how they’re getting on.

In fairness, none of this was completely revolutionary. All schools have management information systems, finance systems, HR systems and so forth; and most now have some kind of online learning, behaviour and parental engagement platforms, even if it’s just paying for school meals and assigning homework. The difference is that most schools buy in a suite of different products that don’t talk to each other: the data is fragmented and unstructured. Where ten years ago parents had to dig around for change for lunch money, now they have to remember the login details for umpteen different platforms. At Inspired, all the data is on one platform owned by the company.

There’s one other, crucial difference about Inspired Education’s approach. They laid a foundation, so that when LLMs hit the mainstream in 2023, Inspired had everything in place to leverage its potential for education in ways that had never been done before. And they were ready to move fast.

AI’s impact on core processes

Torben came late to the education business, after spending the first part of his career working for media companies, starting at the same time as the internet began to take off. ‘I spent 20 years on digital transformation in print and television, digitising all that,’ he recalls, ‘but that sort of finished. So I wondered, which other industry was ripe for a similar level of transformation?’ As a parent of four children, Torben could see that education fitted the bill. He wanted to be a part of changing it.

But he hadn’t foreseen the explosion of AI. Inspired’s platform had been built to use well-established adaptive learning software from third-party providers. Torben freely admits that when ChatGPT burst onto the scene in 2023, even a forward-looking company like Inspired had no generative AI strategy.

‘It hit me like a revelation,’ he says. ‘I could see it would be big in many areas of our company, but particularly the core academic processes,’ so much of which are based on the written and spoken word. ‘And the reason we’ve been able to move much faster in AI than other educational companies,’ Torben adds, ‘is because we had the platform. No-one had as much data as we did.’ Grasping the implications of GenAI, he established a series of ‘speedboat’ projects that would deliver quick-turnaround applications for Inspired’s three key stakeholder groups: students, staff and parents.

First up: the teachers.

The Lesson Planner

To understand the landscape, Faculty helped Inspired survey school leaders and frontline teachers. Over 700 responded, revealing that teachers were spending an average of over six hours per week on lesson planning, and over four hours on creating and marking weekly tests.

With those to work off, Faculty developed a proprietary LLM modelling framework for Inspired. Following best-practice learning design, it starts with the teacher. They create and edit a lesson plan with help from AI, and then type in some simple lesson objectives in a few sentences. When they’re done, the model goes to work.

Built on top of GPT4, it breaks down the content generation system into multiple steps. It uses Retrieval Augmented Generation techniques to work out which are the most relevant lessons in the databank; draws the appropriate content from them for structuring lessons; then generates the lesson content according to this plan. It creates teaching slides, in-class activities and assignments, all formatted to Inspired’s design template. Everything is ready for the teacher to review in under a minute. And because it’s all on the single study platform, lessons are available for any pupils who need to catch up, or want to review the material after class. 

But as much as you try to teach them, how can you tell what’s going in?

The Cycle Test Generator

Visit any Inspired school anywhere in the world at 10am on a Monday morning, and you’ll find every pupil over the age of nine sitting a ‘Cycle Test’ to assess what they’ve learned in the past week. These have been part of the routine at Inspired ever since it was founded, allowing teachers to track progress in fine detail and give formative feedback, and getting children used to the discipline of test-taking long before they reach the high-stakes exams of later years.

Taking the tests is a lot of work for the kids. It’s even more onerous for the teachers: writing the tests, marking them, entering marks in the system and providing the kind of rich feedback that makes a difference. Over 500,000 tests need to be generated, leading to two million scripts that have to be marked every year.

Enter the Cycle Test Generator. Using existing test examples, and user research with teachers, Faculty and Inspired created an AI application that covers the whole process from start to finish. It allows teachers to choose the subject and topic, then automatically generates questions in line with the British National Curriculum across the full range of question types: multiple choice, show-your-working, retrieval and (coming soon) essays. 

Setting goals beyond the classroom

Torben’s goal is to cut staff lesson-planning time, homework-marking time, test-preparation and marking time all ‘in half’. In terms of pupil outcomes, Inspired has already seen an 8% rise in performance - equivalent to an entire grade boundary - thanks to its wider investments in education technology. They’re now thinking about training the AI in other languages and other curricula. And they’ve barely scratched the surface of what their data can yield.

As well as the ‘speedboat’ applications, Torben has asked Faculty to take on a ‘supertanker’. This is a long-term, strategic project to structure every piece of data held anywhere in Inspired’s systems, so it can all be aggregated and analysed for insights into how children learn, and used to correlate insights from students around the world. ‘We are probably the world leader in terms of having the amount of structured data required to do this at scale,’ Torben points out, ‘and we can use that information to supplement the learning curve for each child.’

Nor is he looking to keep the software and the insights proprietary. ‘We have these top private schools, so we would be a logical first mover investing more on this up front, but we are very conscious that this can also help the wider system. And our intention and approach is for this to escape out to the state school systems.’

It’s very likely that education will change more in the next ten years, thanks to AI, than it has in the last five hundred. As Inspired shows, it has the potential to make teachers better at what they do well, and free them from what slows them down, to the huge benefit of the kids they teach.

Everyone can learn from that.