Alison "Ali" Gellett leads The Big AI Project at the Oasis Big Education Institute. The project aims to give every school in the UK and the Republic of Ireland what it needs to approach AI safely, ethically and strategically. Ali has 30 years of experience in educational leadership across teaching, multi-academy trust (MAT) executive leadership and local government. She is a Fellow of the Royal Society of Arts.

For the past decade, Ali has focused on transforming the education sector by co-designing solutions with schools. She founded and runs the My Future programme, which teaches careers, aspirations and essential skills to primary school children. Since 2021 it has reached more than 35,000 children and enabled over 800,000 encounters between children and employers. It is funded by Essex County Council and has just launched its first London pilot. The Big AI Project grew out of Big Education's Rethinking School programme and is funded by Salesforce. It is free and AI-agnostic, and its materials were designed by teachers and quality-assured by Professor Rose Luckin's team at Educate Ventures Research. After a pilot with more than 230 schools, it is now rolling out nationally. That includes a region-wide partnership with the Liverpool City Region Combined Authority covering its 400–500 schools. Ali co-authored The Big AI Project report (March 2026).

In this episode, Ali talks with Svenia Busson about:

• Why a school's AI strategy should start with vision, purpose and pedagogy, not with choosing tools
• Building a coalition of 50+ partners around shared values, and keeping commercial and political motives out of the room
• A four-hour, AI-agnostic training for heads — and why their confidence rises from 1–2 out of 5 to 4–5 out of 5
• AI literacy from age 3 to 14, with prediction games, bias and stereotyping activities, and class agreements not to share misinformation
• Anthropomorphism, deepfakes and the AI tool that erased the features of a child with Down's syndrome from a nursery resource
• "Truth has gone": misinformation, young people's mental health, and a million 16–25-year-olds not in education, employment or training
• Why human connection and essential skills matter more than ever in a world full of AI
• The Good Future Foundation AI Quality Mark, and why schools that go it alone end up making their job harder