Let Teachers SHINE Winner 2026: Matt Revill – AI For Access
A primary school headteacher is pioneering the use of AI to speed up planning, create resources and make classrooms more responsive to learners’ needs.
Matt Revill has been awarded a £12,000 Let Teachers SHINE grant to develop AI for Access, an innovative project designed to train teachers in the effective and safe use of artificial intelligence to quickly plan lessons and adapt teaching resources.
“Pupil cohorts are changing quite rapidly in terms of their level of need,” explained Matt, “and it’s not just the level of need – it’s the complexity and the variety of need.”
AI for Access aims to help teachers create materials that are tailored to the specific needs of their pupils. For example, AI can simplify classroom texts so that lower-ability readers can still participate in whole-class reading lessons.
“What AI can offer is a manageable way of doing adaptive teaching, creating altered resources, planning things in different ways to meet those different needs,” explained Matt.
Matt emphasised that the project can reduce teacher workload, because tasks that once took 15 to 20 minutes, such as creating a good example or translating text for EAL learners, can now be completed in seconds – allowing teachers to focus more of their energy on their pupils.
“There are never enough hours in the day to get everything done,” said Matt, “There’s a national teacher recruitment and retention crisis going on. With budgets shrinking, teachers are struggling,” said Matt.
AI for Access will focus on teaching staff how to write good-quality AI prompts – the specific instructions that AI uses to generate content. “If we can give teachers the tools to meet the individual needs of children in their class, it will help the children, the teachers, and the schools,” said Matt.
A critical part of the project involves setting up a network of AI champions in schools to build expertise and best practice. Teachers will be trained how to use AI safely by removing sensitive student information before inputting data into models like ChatGPT, Gemini, or Google NotebookLM.
Matt plans to set up a website containing a resource bank of template AI prompts that teachers can then copy and paste, adding: “I think until teachers start to use AI properly, they don’t realise how powerful it can be, not just from an organisational or administrative point of view, but also for planning and resourcing lessons.”
In a broader context, AI for Access can also help school leaders analyse data, identifying hidden patterns in attendance and behaviour. This will enable schools to identify trends that might otherwise be missed and set up targeted interventions accordingly.
On winning the Let Teachers SHINE award Matt said: “I’m just really pleased. We’re a small village primary school and with all the demands on schools, it’s hard for us to spread the word. This funding from SHINE means we can get decent equipment and go out across the trust to deliver real impact for many more children.”