Medly selected for the UK government's AI Tutoring Tools Pioneer Programme

Medly selected for the UK government's AI Tutoring Tools Pioneer Programme

2 July 2026

Medly has been selected as one of eight organisations awarded a research and development contract under the UK government's AI Tutoring Tools Pioneer Programme, led by the Incubator for AI (part of the Department for Science, Innovation & Technology, DSIT), with the Department for Education (DfE) as delivery partner.

For two doctors who left the NHS to build the study tool they wished they'd had growing up, being asked to help shape what good AI tutoring looks like for the whole country is about as close to our mission as it gets.

We were chosen from a competitive field of 53 bids.

What the programme actually is

This is a research and development programme. Over the coming months we'll work with four partner schools to co-design a shared standard for AI tutoring and to test tools in real classrooms under teacher supervision. A national rollout to pupils sits outside its scope and would be a separate decision for government to make later.

The government has been candid about why the programme exists: AI tutoring tools on the market today are limited in scope and evidence. We agree. We've said before on this blog that scepticism about AI in education is healthy, and our answer is to build the evidence carefully, with teachers, and to be honest about what the technology can and can't do yet.

As the first AI tutor built specifically for GCSEs and A-Levels, we've spent the past two years working closely with students and teachers to understand what good looks like, and the evaluation reflected that.

Why this matters to us

Our founders, Dr Paul Jung and Dr Kavi Samra, didn't have access to private tutoring growing up. They saw first-hand what a difference personalised support makes, and how unfair it is that it's usually reserved for families who can afford it.

Private tutoring still costs many families hundreds or thousands of pounds a year. A national effort to make personalised support available to every pupil, particularly the most disadvantaged, is the kind of thing we left medicine to be part of.

How we'll approach it

We're bringing the same principles to this work that we apply to everything we build:

• Teachers come first. Co-design with schools sits at the centre of the programme, and Medly handles the adaptive practice and feedback so teachers can spend their time explaining, motivating, and spotting where a student is stuck.
• We built our safeguarding in from the start. Any tool in this programme has to meet the DfE's Generative AI Product Safety Standards, and we already run an AI-powered safeguarding layer with enhanced-DBS-checked safeguarding leads, full GDPR compliance, registration with the ICO, and a design built to the Age Appropriate Design Code.
• Medly guides students towards answers rather than handing them over.

What happens next

Over the coming months we'll co-design with our partner schools and refine our tools through classroom testing. The insights and quality standards that come out of the programme will be shared openly with the wider sector through a government-hosted "Reading Room" (available via DfE's AI Content Store), so the whole field can benefit instead of each company repeating the same research.

If the broader initiative proceeds, DfE has said that, if proven effective, up to 450,000 disadvantaged pupils could stand to benefit from the opportunity that AI tutoring could provide.