About
The science of learning, translated into practice that lasts.
Build Better Education works with schools on formative practice: eliciting what students are thinking, interpreting it honestly, and acting on it. This assistant is that work, available at the moment you need it.
Why it exists
Advice that is there on Tuesday at 7am.
Most of what a school learns on a training day is gone within a term. Not because the ideas were wrong, but because the moment you need them arrives three weeks later, at seven in the morning, while you are planning a lesson the training day never mentioned.
The assistant carries the whole collection into that moment: 138 curated works on learning and assessment, from the EEF guidance reports to Wiliam, Hattie, Kirschner and Hendrick. It answers from those, quotes the passage it relied on, and turns the conversation into something you can teach with.
Who is behind it
Two vantage points, and the gap between them.
Good ideas rarely fail on their merits. They fail in the distance between the idea and next Monday's lesson. Valentina and Samuel work at opposite ends of that distance, which is why the product is shaped the way it is.
Valentina Devid
Implementation · leadership · whole-school development
A former teacher and middle leader who now trains and advises schools, in the Netherlands and increasingly abroad. Her question is never whether an approach is sound, but whether it will still be alive in a school a year from now — which means working on leadership, structures and follow-through rather than on enthusiasm.
That is where the assistant's configurability comes from: a school that is accountable for the advice has to be able to change it.
Samuel Derkse
Teacher · learning support · classroom practitioner
A teacher of Dutch and a learning-support specialist who is in front of a class every day, and who practises formative action in his own lessons rather than only describing it. He finds out first-hand which ideas survive contact with thirty students on a Thursday afternoon, and keeps trying the ones that did not land the first time.
That is where the refusal to hand over vague advice comes from. A lesson plan that cannot be taught is not a lesson plan.
What we hold to
Four positions we do not trade away.
They are why the product behaves the way it does: why it cites, why it refuses to answer beyond the collection, and why it will tell you that you are wrong.
- Teaching is decided in the moment.
- Evidence must survive a classroom.
- A tool should show its reasoning.
- Disagreement is a feature.
How it is built
A curated collection, not a chatbot.
The model does not answer from its own memory. It retrieves from the works in the collection, and is instructed to say so when they do not cover the question.
- The collection decides138 works chosen for what they are worth, not for what a crawler happened to find. Your own policy and terminology are added on top and weighted.
- Every claim is traceableOpen “What is this based on?” and you get the claim, the passage, the work it came from, and why it matters here.
- Nothing is a black boxThe instructions, the source weighting, the terminology it must use — all editable, versioned, and every change recorded.
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