Announcing the WInners of the 2026 Tools Competition!
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Chalk is learning platform built on evidence, supporting teachers and students through two integrated tools. The teacher platform saves teachers six hours a week on planning and resource creation. Chalk Tutor, the new student-facing tool funded by this prize, applies Direct Instruction and Mayer’s multimedia principles to deliver explicit, accessible teaching for neurodivergent learners.
Philip Bell
Co-Founder, Chalk Learning
Philip Bell
Co-Founder, Chalk Learning
Phil combines five years of classroom teaching through Teach First with AI engineering experience at Cognino and product leadership at Arbor Education (a leading UK school MIS). Phil holds an MSc in Computer Science from Georgia Tech and was a Harvard Fulbright Scholar studying education.
Peyman Owladi
CTO and Co-founder, Chalk Learning
Peyman Owladi
CTO and Co-founder, Chalk Learning
Peyman Owladi is CTO and co-founder of Chalk Learning. He holds a Mathematics degree from the University of Cambridge and began his career as an engineer at Cisco. Most recently he served as CTO at Learning with Parents, a fast-growing UK edtech where he built and scaled a tool reaching hundreds of thousands of students. He also leads the Fair Education Alliance AI group.
Dr. Hester Burn
Lead Researcher, University College London
Dr. Hester Burn
Lead Researcher, University College London
Dr. Hettie Burn is a Research Fellow in the Centre for Teachers and Teaching Research at the UCL Institute of Education. Previously she taught secondary mathematics for five years through Teach First, completed an Ed.M. in International Education Policy at Harvard Graduate School of Education, and holds a PhD in Economics from the University of Essex, where her work used large datasets and quasi-experimental methods to study drivers of inequality in outcomes for children and young people.
