Recallify Wins Innovate UK Women in Innovation Award

Our co-founder Dr Sarah Rudebeck has won an Innovate UK Women in Innovation Award. The £75,000 grant funds Recallify Classroom, a version of the app built for young people aged 11 to 18 with special educational needs and disabilities. Over the next twelve months we will redesign Recallify with learners and school staff, build a version that runs on school laptops and browsers, put it through an independent safeguarding and data protection review, and pilot it in a secondary school in Surrey. Sarah is one of 61 award winners, selected from a record 1,590 applications.

The gap this project addresses

Around one in five pupils in England are identified as having special educational needs. Many of these young people find it hard to concentrate in lessons, hold on to what they have been taught, or keep track of tasks and homework. That leads to heavy reliance on teachers and teaching assistants for repeated instructions, reminders and catch-up support, at a time when staff time is already stretched and the funding that pays for that support is under severe pressure.

Schools already use assistive technology, but most of it is built for reading and writing. There is very little that supports working memory, attention and organisation, which is what most of the young people Sarah sees in clinic struggle with. Recallify Classroom works from a learner’s own lesson material rather than generic content, and supports strategies education already relies on: revisiting information, practising recall, and breaking work into smaller steps. We have written before about the study strategies that hold up for SEN learners, and this project puts them into the school day.

Recallify Classroom in practice

Learners will be able to save lesson materials, including notes, documents, photographs of the board and audio, and get back clear summaries, transcripts, short practice questions and reminders to help with organisation. The aim is not to replace teaching or to give answers, but to help learners access what was taught and practise it again in a manageable way. It is not a substitute for a teacher or for any support set out in an Education, Health and Care Plan.

The classroom version will run on school-owned laptops and browsers rather than phones, since most schools do not permit phone use in lessons. It builds on the Recallify web app, which already runs in any modern browser on a laptop or desktop.

The project in four stages

The twelve months break into four stages.

Learners with SEND and education staff will take part in co-design workshops, exploring what they find difficult now and what would help, and shaping the design directly. A decision log will record which suggestions were implemented and why, so the process is transparent to everyone who takes part.

We will then build the classroom version for school devices, informed by what comes out of those workshops.

Before any pilot begins, the tool goes through an independent safeguarding, data protection and ethics review. Recording in a classroom raises real questions about consent and children’s data, and we would rather work through them properly at the start than retrofit answers later. TINIE.AI Ltd is registered with the Information Commissioner’s Office and holds Cyber Essentials certification.

Finally, a usability study in school will test routine use, gathering feedback from learners and staff on whether it works in a real classroom.

The research alongside the project runs with King’s College London, supervised by Professor Matteo Cella, with Dr Gemma Costello, a consultant educational psychologist specialising in paediatric neuropsychology, ensuring the tool fits how SEND classrooms work.

About the Women in Innovation Award

The Innovate UK Women in Innovation Awards support women founders and co-founders of UK small and medium-sized businesses. Winners receive a £75,000 grant alongside twelve months of business support, training, networking and mentoring. The programme marks its tenth anniversary this year.

Where Recallify comes from

We built Recallify to close the gap between what is known clinically about memory and attention and the everyday tools people have to live with them. Sarah is a senior clinical neuropsychologist who spent fifteen years in the NHS working with people facing neurological, neurodevelopmental and learning challenges, and the app is shaped by that experience. Recallify is already used by around 3,000 people and is currently being evaluated in a feasibility study funded by the National Institute for Health and Care Research, looking at brain injury self-management, run in partnership with the University of Essex.

Day to day it is used as memory support on iOS, Android and the web, and our learning companion for students with special educational needs covers the study side of the same work. Recallify Classroom carries that into the school day.

Recallify Classroom is in development and is not yet available. If you are a school interested in the pilot, or want to hear when it launches, get in touch at Info@recallify.ai.

Recallify is designed as an everyday support tool and is not a medical device. It does not provide diagnosis or clinical decision support, and is intended to complement, not replace, professional medical care.