Westbourne School has been named the UK’s most innovative school, winning a prestigious national award for its pioneering, teacher-led artificial intelligence platform, KnowVa Coach.
There is a monumental achievement happening right on our doorstep! Westbourne School in Penarth has just been crowned the UK’s leading innovator in education, taking home the Best Use of Education Technology prize at the Independent Schools of the Year Awards 2025.
The secret to their success is KnowVa Coach, a proprietary AI revision tutor co-developed with Cardiff University’s Neuroscience Department. This homegrown AI tool is enhancing human teaching, driving a reported 30+% uplift in student attainment, and helping Westbourne students achieve some of their best-ever Sixth Form and GCSE results. This is exactly the kind of groundbreaking, future-focused thinking that makes our city region shine.
What Students Say
“KnowVa Coach makes it really easy to revise. It uses Socratic questioning, which pulls
questions related to the topic to expand your answer and knowledge, and it shows you what
a perfect answer to the question looks like. I’m using KnowVa Coach for Computer Science,
and we also have it for Business Management as well. It really helps you deepen your
knowledge in core areas.” (Westbourne Sixth Form Student)
“It’s very simple to use and is really useful because it truly prompts you to say as much as
you can on that topic. KnowVa Coach pushes you, saying, ‘Can you comment further on
this?’ It helps my brain make connections between themes and questions. It works
especially well for me as I don’t like studying in isolation, on my own. Having the AI there
saying, ‘Oh, you did this really well’, or ‘You could try that better’ is motivating you to keep
going.” (Westbourne Sixth Form Student)
“KnowVa Coach is really helping me to revise for my IB exams. It provokes me to think more
and to delve into all the details. KnowVa Coach works with a pool of IB resources, so it
directly uses IB materials and past papers and mark schemes. I know that the information is
valid and can be trusted, moreso than the Internet, for example, which always needs to be
checked.” (Westbourne Sixth Form Student)
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