“Are we squeezing every minute out of every single lesson?” asks Mike Lambert, global education director at Inspired Education, an international schools group with 125 schools worldwide.

It’s a rhetorical question for Lambert, who says it’s clear that we are not.

“When you’ve got 20 to 30 pupils moving in lockstep through the curriculum, even though they may be wanting to operate at different paces, you’re not necessarily making sure that every minute matters.”

This, he explains, is the issue that the new Inspired Edge Academy has been developed to address by putting technology - chiefly AI - at the heart of how primary education could be delivered. And this poses interesting questions for the future of education.

What is Inspired Edge?

Inspired says Edge Academy, at its core, is an “AI-enabled primary school model”, aimed at pupils in Years 3 to 6 and aligned to the English national curriculum.

It will launch in London in January, “attached to an existing school” - although the group does not say which one.

This launch will be followed by others in Lisbon, Milan, Madrid, Mexico City, São Paulo and Auckland from September 2027, with these Inspired Edge Academies to have their own dedicated campuses, set apart from existing Inspired schools.

The goal, Lambert explains, is to make full use of the personalised learning made possible by AI to allow pupils to progress at their own pace - not the pace of the class - and ultimately gain foundational knowledge in core subjects faster.

The vision is that this will “reclaim” time for children to take part in the “meaningful application” of their knowledge through interdisciplinary projects aimed at developing financial literacy, entrepreneurship, public speaking and problem-solving skills.

“Traditional classrooms work on a one-size-fits-all model and not every child is able to learn as quickly or efficiently as they could do if they were given their own personalised, adaptive learning,” Lambert says.

He argues that technology now makes this possible - and allows schools to become more real world-focused in what they teach. “Hence the dual model of morning mastery and the afternoon interdisciplinary, project-based learning,” Lambert says.

A typical day

The idea is for Inspired Edge Academy pupils to spend the morning, around three hours, using adaptive learning platforms to cover the core areas of English and foreign languages, maths, science and computing.

However, Lambert is keen to point out that this does not just mean pupils will be glued to screens all morning.

Instead, he says the adaptive learning platform will be “the primary mechanism of content delivery” but sessions will be “targeted”, usually lasting around 25 to 30 minutes each, with teachers on hand to support pupils if they get stuck and “utilise the data that comes off the platform for diagnostics”.

So small groups of pupils with a similar problem or misconception, for instance, might be brought together and tutored.

Lambert adds: “It’s not as rigid as saying, ‘Three hours in the morning, adaptive learning platforms.’ It is a real dance on and off the adaptive learning platforms, into mastery workshops, as well as interweaving some of those skills into the afternoon interdisciplinary projects as well.”

This may be made somewhat easier by the fact that Inspired envisages one teacher for every eight pupils and that children will be grouped based on mastery rather than age and year groups.

Interdisciplinary projects

In the afternoon sessions, pupils will take part in interdisciplinary projects that will last for six weeks each, meaning that across an academic year they will tackle six in total.

Nadim Nsouli, CEO and founder of Inspired, suggests that this “could see children learn how to build a drone or run an Airbnb”.

Lambert, meanwhile, envisages pupils learning about food and nutrition and then being tasked with coming up with a concept for their own street-food van, designing menus, creating a working app and ensuring that they would turn a profit - and then doing all of this at an actual event at their school.

“Basically they are applying rigorous academic, national curriculum-aligned content to a real-world entrepreneurial project, blending all of these different disciplines together, while covering everything they need to,” Lambert says.

Another example could be pupils analysing the influence of the Romans in modern-day London, using online mapping tools to overlay historical maps on to modern maps and identifying what has changed in the city and what has endured.

Then, once their research is completed, they could design a walking tour combining ancient routes and modern landmarks, and create a pitch trying to sell it to a local museum.

Again, Lambert says the key is they are “blending” multiple curricular areas such as “history, geography, English, technology”, as well as engaging in real-world skills like public speaking and developing skills like marketing.

Accelerated progress

Even though this is all new, big gains are anticipated by Inspired Education, with the expectation that pupils taught this way will progress up to three times faster than those being taught using more conventional methods.

It’s a big claim but Lambert says it is based on the group’s experience of using AI to support learning to date.

The group has been experimenting with adaptive learning platforms for five years. Lambert says 44 schools currently use the technology and have seen “much higher than expected progress on age-based norms”.

However, he says they have not been leveraging its full potential: “Now we are going to use the full content, we’re anticipating up to three times the learning speed from what we have seen already.”

Secondary curriculum in the pipeline

Although the current plans only specify this for pupils in Years 3 to 6, the intention is that by 2028, when the oldest of these children are ready to progress into Year 7, a curriculum will be ready for them.

Lambert explains that the next 12 months will be spent “fleshing out the skeleton” of this curriculum for Years 7 to 13, so pupils are not forced to default to a more standard curriculum and delivery.

“There’s absolutely no reason why we can’t populate several year groups assigned for secondary as well from September 2028,” he says.

However, because the Edge Academy plan is based on the foundation of the English national curriculum, pupils would be able to move to another school afterwards without issue, Lambert adds.

“If at the end of Year 6 pupils decide they want to re-enter mainstream education, we will make sure they have met the age-based criteria to do so.”

Increased competition

Commenting on the plans, Dr Tristan Bunnell, a University of Bath academic and international school expert, says they show that international groups like Inspired “are becoming increasingly ambitious and innovative” in response to the fact that almost 40 per cent of international schools are now within groups.

”[This] seems like an inevitable attempt to differentiate in the growing and increasingly crowded market,” he tells Tes.

The introduction of a unique curriculum - designed in-house - suggests a move away from “an international schools model made up of separate schools towards a ‘global school’ one”, says Bunnell.

Bigger groups, he adds, are “moving towards operating as a ‘system’, with a similar curriculum”, with the added benefit being that “they can do their own teacher training and CPD” to complement this.

Meanwhile, Sami Yosef, ISC Research’s head of global research, predicts that international school groups “may start to compete less on which curriculum they offer and more on how they deliver it”, with the design of the learning experience potentially “the key differentiator moving forward”.

He says: “I don’t think this signals a move away from recognised curricula any time soon. Those frameworks still matter, especially for university pathways. What I do think we’ll see more of is groups building their own delivery models on top of those frameworks. In other words, the curriculum might stay familiar, but the way it’s experienced could look quite different.”

What remains to be seen, he adds, is whether changes designed to deliver improvements in outcomes will live up to expectations.

Inspired is aware that its new teaching model is not something that will necessarily appeal to everyone. “Not all families will want this,” Lambert admits.

“Some pupils work well when moving in lockstep at the average pace of the class. Some parents want to keep their children in a traditional classroom and may not want them using adaptive learning platforms,” he says.

However, it is clear that Inspired is betting that its model could reimagine how primary teaching is delivered.

Lambert says: “We know that education has long aspired to ensure that no child is left behind - what we often forget is we don’t want to have any child held back either.”