Third Space Learning

AI tutors in schools are AI tools used to give pupils structured, teacher-directed, curriculum-aligned support through targeted practice, feedback and consolidation. For school leaders, teachers, tutoring leads and other education decision-makers, the question is no longer just whether the technology works, but which kind of AI tutor pupils will actually use well enough to improve learning – especially if the goal is to narrow attainment gaps rather than widen them.

Scaffolding in education is easy to put up and surprisingly hard to take down. Knowing which strategies a child actually needs – and when to start removing your support – is what turns scaffolding into independent learning rather than quiet dependence. After more than a decade designing one-to-one maths lessons, and over 2.1 million of them delivered, it is a question my team and I have wrestled with more than almost any other.

If you lead a school or a trust, you’re probably already allowing AI in some form. Letting a tool speak directly to your pupils is a bigger step, and you need to be sure it’s safe. In January 2026 the Department for Education gave schools something to work with. Its generative AI product safety standards, updated on 19 January 2026, set out 13 things an AI product has to do to count as safe in an educational setting. It’s the first shared benchmark you can hold any tool against.

The attainment gap in secondary maths has barely shifted in a decade, and not for want of knowing the answer. As stated by the EEF, one-to-one tutoring is one of the most effective interventions there is. Yet, most schools can only afford it for a handful of pupils, so it gets rationed long before it reaches everyone who needs it.

We know one-to-one tutoring works. So why isn’t the maths attainment gap closing? For most schools, the honest answer is that high-quality one-to-one support has always been too expensive to give to every pupil who needs it, so it gets rationed to a chosen few. Here, two primary leaders explain how they removed that rationing decision and what changed when one-to-one maths support reached every disadvantaged pupil, not just a handful. The disadvantage gap in primary maths is not closing fast enough.

For most teachers, the first real lesson in artificial intelligence does not come from a training day. It comes at 7am, in front of a blank planning document, with five retrieval questions to write, tomorrow’s worksheet to adapt, a parent email to send and a lesson to think clearly about. I teach, and I train other teachers to use AI well across a range of education settings.

For most of you, the 2026 maths GCSEs are complete! A huge well done to you and your students for all of the hard work you put in. While you wait for the results, we’re back with our teacher survey for a second year. Last year, for the first time, we asked those of you who saw your Year 11 cohort through their maths GCSEs to share your opinions on the papers. The response was so valuable that we’ve made it an annual fixture.

The final GCSE Maths exam paper of the series lands on Wednesday 10th June. With Paper 1 and Paper 2 behind them, Year 11s have one week to make their last bit of revision count. Edexcel Paper 2 has given teachers a clearer steer on where to focus that time. In this blog, GCSE maths specialist Christine Norledge breaks down what came up on maths Paper 2 and what it suggests for Paper 3.

An AI teaching assistant is a software tool that uses artificial intelligence, typically generative AI and machine learning, to support teachers and students with structured instructional tasks. It can deliver personalised learning, provide actionable feedback in real time, and handle administrative tasks, freeing human teaching assistants to focus on relationships, SEND support and pastoral care.

When the DfE committed £23m to bring AI tutoring to up to 450,000 disadvantaged pupils by 2027, the criticism came quickly and from several directions. But two debates are being treated as one. The first is about AI tutoring as a category: what it is, what works, and what doesn’t. The second is about the DfE pilot specifically: whether this is the right intervention, for the right pupils, delivered in the right way. Both debates are worth having.