Tandemteach.ai
An AI toolkit for UK primary teachers where safety is the architecture, not a filter bolted on at the end.
Ø1 Problem
Teachers of Years 1 to 6 spend their evenings writing reading passages, comprehension questions and end-of-term reports. General-purpose AI can draft those in seconds, but it was never built for a classroom: no curriculum alignment, no safeguarding, and no way for a school to trust what comes out. A tool that is wrong once in front of a class is a tool nobody uses twice.
Ø2 Solution
A platform where safety is the design, not a setting. Four AI providers sit behind one pipeline, each hidden behind a common adapter interface, so a provider can be swapped or retired without touching the tools that call it. Every generation passes through eight safety layers on the way in and the way out: provider moderation, our own classifiers, curriculum constraints and output checks. If any layer objects, nothing reaches the teacher. Retrieval over real curriculum data from government sources keeps the content grounded rather than merely plausible.
Ø3 Delivery
I designed and built the platform end to end: a PHP API organised as Controllers, Services and Adapters, a WordPress marketing front, Stripe subscriptions with a monthly credit ledger, a personal library with export, and the ordinary work that makes a product real. A small feedback plugin for charter members stores no link to the user account, sets no cookies and loads no third-party scripts. Live since 2025, with teachers on paid plans.
Notes from the build
- Provider-agnostic pipeline: one interface per adapter, so the safety layers never know which model answered.
- Eight checks on every generation, more than government guidance asks for. Any single layer can veto.
- Retrieval-augmented generation grounded in official curriculum data, not the model's memory.
- Stripe billing with a credit ledger, so the cost of every generation is visible to the teacher and to us.
- Accessibility, GDPR and child safety designed in from the first commit, not audited in at the end.
