Now every child can afford one. Foundations teaches children aged 4 to 9 to read, write and do arithmetic, one to one, from an AI tutor that maps how your child thinks, at an everyday price. It works alongside school, never instead of it, and it grows with your child all the way to nineteen.
Why we are building X-School · a film from our school
The product
Foundations is not a learning app with levels. It is a tutor with a memory. Every session it maps how your child thinks: which sounds she can blend, which numbers she truly owns, what makes her lean in, where she gives up. That living map is her learner profile, and it decides every next lesson.
Fifteen to twenty minutes a day, voice-first. It listens to your child read aloud, hears the exact sound that breaks, and builds tonight's story around dinosaurs, ponies or the lake behind your house, using precisely the words she needs next. Structured, phonics-first reading, mastery arithmetic, never tired of the fourth question. And it remembers everything, month after month.
Never a replacement. Parents get a two-minute digest each week: what clicked, what to celebrate at dinner. Teachers get something better: a report showing exactly where each child stands, sound by sound, skill by skill, so the classroom hour finally lands where it is needed. From Middle Years on, a human coach joins for regular check-ins.
The profile a five-year-old starts is the one that carries her to nineteen. Foundations becomes Middle Years, then Upper Years: sixteen competencies, peer projects across time zones, real-world challenges, all the way to an accredited path through high school. Same tutor. It just knows her better every year.
Real school first
Most AI schools are apps looking for children. We went the other way. We built a physical school first: the X-Schule in Cologne, Germany opens its doors in September 2026, with real teachers, real classrooms and a curriculum designed from scratch. Hundreds of families have already registered interest, months before opening, and teams across Europe are adopting the concept. Every method we ship online is validated there first, by real teachers with real children.
The world must change, and so must our schools. The School of the Future shows us the way forward and gives hope for a better future - because the future begins with our children.
The X-School contributes to transform the vision of education into reality.
The idea
The classroom was a compromise. The compromise just expired.
Ask any parent when their child truly learned something and they describe the same scene: one adult, fully present, catching the exact moment a young mind clicks or slips. Not the worksheet. The attention. Every breakthrough your child has ever had happened inside somebody's undivided attention.
Schools were never designed to provide that. They were designed to ration it. Attention was the scarcest resource in education, so we stretched one adult across thirty children and called the average pace a curriculum. A sensible compromise for two hundred years. Not a law of nature.
AI ends the rationing. A tutor that gives your child every hour, undivided: it catches the half-second hesitation before an answer, recalls what clicked in March, reframes tonight's problem around what she loves. And because it stays for years, it can pass on what no worksheet ever taught anyone: how to take a problem apart, when to trust yourself, what a good question sounds like. Science fiction named this dream decades ago. We would rather give it a start date.
The evidence
The need is as settled as the method. In the US, around four in ten fourth graders now read below even the basic level, the worst share in over two decades, and scores keep falling across the OECD. Every serious study points the same way: one-to-one attention works, AI tutoring works, and both work best with humans in the loop. So we start where attention pays the most: the first years. Reading, writing, arithmetic, mastered early, and a tutor that then stays for the whole climb.
Four years of homework
In 2020, a team of educators, entrepreneurs, scientists and artists set out to answer one question: what should a school teach, if you could start from zero? We took the question seriously.
The founding team comes together and the research begins.
Four years in, the concept is complete: 16 competencies, four worlds, one method.
The first physical X-Schule opens its doors in Cologne this September. Real teachers, real children.
Foundations launches worldwide: the tutor for ages 4 to 9, with 100 founding families first.
The curriculum
It starts with the three foundations every future rests on: reading, writing, arithmetic. Then it opens up. Four years of research came down to one question: what does a child need to master by twenty-five? Not a subject list. Sixteen competencies across four worlds, unlocked from Middle Years on.
Critical thinking, resilience, knowing yourself. The operating system underneath everything else.
Leadership, collaboration, social responsibility. How you move among people, and for them.
AI fluency, digital craft, building real things. The tools of the century, mastered rather than feared.
Purpose, wellbeing, meaning. The quiet answer to what all the effort is actually for.
Fifteen minutes in 2027
After school, after the snack. Short by design: young children learn most in brief, frequent, focused sessions held at the exact edge of ability, recall before new material, and every session closed on a win.
Three quick recalls from yesterday first, because remembering beats rereading, and starting with success makes her lean in.
Mia reads to the tutor. It hears her stumble on the br in brown, says nothing yet, and quietly queues that sound for tonight.
Five minutes of mastery math, one small step past what she already owns. A wrong answer gets a different explanation, not a red X.
A fresh story appears, ponies this week, written around exactly the sounds and words she needs next. She never notices the curriculum. That is the point.
Nineteen minutes, closed on a success. Mum gets a two-line digest. Overnight, the tutor rebuilds tomorrow around today.
When she is ten, the fifteen minutes grows into a whole school. It will already have known her for years.
The ladder
Every stage feeds the same deepening learner profile. From Middle Years on, students build a detailed portfolio with internationally recognized accreditation, and structured preparation for whichever exams their route requires. Yes, it counts.
Reading, writing and arithmetic with a personal tutor, fifteen minutes a day, as a supplement alongside any school.
The full school opens: sixteen competencies, peer projects, a human coach, documented in a portfolio a report card cannot match.
The same foundation plus targeted preparation for external examinations on the route each student chooses.
The people behind it
Internationally recognized expert for public and private education. Shaped the X-School concept as founding Chief of Education.
GermanyArtist and entrepreneur, creative director of RebellComedy. Among the initiators of X-School.
GermanyEntrepreneur and advisor across education and tech ventures. Among the initiators of X-School.
GermanyCEO of the Education Innovation Lab, the pedagogy partner behind the X-School concept.
GermanyAuthor of the bestselling book The AI Classroom. Former teacher, helps educators put AI to work.
United KingdomFounder of Dreamtime Learning Online School. Founder Emeritus of Kangaroo Kids and Billabong High International.
IndiaFounder and CEO of Study Hall, AI-powered study halls for K-12. Advisory board of Common Sense Media.
United KingdomSchool director and founder of Colegio Ikigai, building the future of education in Latin America.
MexicoFounder of Global Town School. PhD in educational administration, decades in K-12 leadership.
United StatesComputer scientist and AI specialist. Coordinates the opencampus machine learning program. Former teacher.
GermanyIn good company
Founding families
Foundations opens to its first one hundred founding families in 2027. They shape it, and they keep their founding price as their child climbs.
Founding families keep their founding rate for as long as they stay. Permanently.
Regular calls with the founding team while we build. Your questions shape real decisions.
Curriculum previews, early assessment for your child, and first pick of places when enrollment opens.
Your mail app just opened with your request. Press send and your place is reserved.