By the sector, for the sector
OEAI is a sector-led non-profit providing schools and school groups data tools and insights that help them improve educational outcomes and opportunities.
OEAI was created and is run by experts from school groups on behalf of the education sector. We are a non-profit organisation that exists to empower the education community with powerful tools and analytics.
TOWARDS EQUITABLE PROGRESS FOR OUR SECTOR
OEAI sits at the heart of an ecosystem of schools and school groups, EdTech companies and data partners.
Our Executive Chair is Lauren Thorpe, Chief Transformation Officer of United Learning Trust. She will be joined by the soon-to-be appointed Chair of the Multi-Academy Trusts’ Advisory Group. The group, made up of representatives from a range of trusts, will ensure the voices of schools and groups are at the heart of our organisational strategy and decision-making.
OEAI is currently incubated by Purposeful Ventures, a non-profit that partners with social entrepreneurs and philanthropists to improve the education and well-being of young people from their earliest years. Amy McJennett, has been appointed to lead OEAI’s day-to-day operations, bringing a wealth of experience across trusts and EdTech.
The problem we could not ignore
After two decades working in education data, Edequity AI Director, Matthew Woodruff, kept encountering the same frustrating pattern. Schools faced identical problems, built similar solutions from scratch but could not share what worked because they used a different combination of EdTech platforms and data sources. As a school governor, he could see the waste and the missed opportunities to gain insights that could help pupils.
He began connecting UK practitioners and in 2023, Matt founded Open Education AI with Lauren Thorpe as a social enterprise with four founding partners: United Learning, Ark Schools, Greenwood Academies Trust and Dixons. This community has grown to over 30 school groups, together representing more than 600 schools.
The next phase
In January 2026, OEAI became a non-profit organisation, working alongside a growing network of EdTech partners, to build a powerful coalition predicated on shared infrastructure, shared learning, and shared progress. With support from Purposeful Ventures, we are now able to expand OEAI much faster and grow our impact.
We want to rapidly grow the number of school groups joining us to continue their own data journey and increase the scope and impact of our work. We want to help them access deeper, more timely insights, and begin to harness the power of machine learning and AI to improve pupils’ educational outcomes and opportunities.
OEAI's JOURNEY
OUR TEAM
Lauren Thorpe, Executive Chair
Lauren co-founded OEAI with Matthew Woodruff in 2023. She is the Chief Transformation Officer at United Learning Trust, the largest schools trust in England, where she leads work on digital strategy and AI, data and insights, curriculum and assessment, and organisational transformation projects. Prior to this, Lauren was Director of Standards & Performance, and Director of Strategy, at Ark. She has previously been a teacher, a research director for a Westminster thinktank, an Ofsted inspector and a school principal. Since September 2024, Lauren has been Chair of the CST Data and Digital Transformation Professional Community, and has served on an DfE EdTech Advisory Board and Workload Review Panel. She holds an undergraduate degree in Computer Science and a master’s degree in ICT in Education.
Amy McJennett, OEAI Lead
Amy previously held a Director position at Ark specialising in innovation in learning programmes and product. Prior to that, she was Director of Digital Product & Services for Pearson. She has worked in the education sector her whole career, starting out as an English secondary school teacher and progressing to senior leadership roles in and across schools and groups. Amy also serves as the current Chair of Governors for Ark Alexandra Academy in Hastings.
Matthew Woodruff - Chair of the Technical Authority
As a data professional and PhD candidate in the field of Machine Learning and Artificial Intelligence in Education, Matthew has helped education institutions leverage value from their technology investments for many years. Through his work with Microsoft in the UK and internationally, Matthew understands that schooling systems are often data-rich but information-poor.
OUR DELIVERY PARTNER
OEAI provides the architecture itself and manages the shared library of tools. While we build our organisational capacity and strategy, we are partnering with Edequity AI to maintain the OEAI architecture and build new analytical tools. Edequity AI Director and OEAI co-founder, Matthew Woodruff has deep and unique expertise in deploying and building with the OEAI architecture. Edequity AI also offers low-cost deployment of OEAI architecture (including building data lakes) to school groups that do not have access to the requisite skills.
In future, we will encourage new delivery partners to apply to OEAI for accreditation.