It seems a little strange for a 14-year-old to be working through an AI curriculum made at MIT while sitting in an old stone building in Oxford that smells a little like libraries and ambition. It’s not what you’d normally think of as a summer school. However, Oxford Royale Academy seems to be making the same point.
In April 2026, the company said it had teamed up with MIT’s RAISE initiative (Responsible AI for Social Empowerment and Education) to give students in its summer program access to the FutureBuilders AI pathway. When students finish it, they get an official MIT RAISE certificate. Oxford Royale hosts more than 3,000 students from more than 175 countries every summer. This is the first time that this is being taught as a formal part of the curriculum.
Take a moment to think about what that really means. These are high school students between the ages of 13 and 18. A lot of them are teenagers who are trying to figure out what they want to do with their lives and are only at Oxford for two weeks. Putting an AI course made by MIT into that window either seems really forward-thinking or a little rushed, depending on who you ask.
There is a good reason to take the positive view. In the past two years, governments all over Europe and Asia have been rushing to make national AI strategies. Poll after poll has shown that employers want new hires to be knowledgeable about AI, but most graduates don’t have that knowledge. That gap must begin in middle school if it does, because if we wait until college to fix it, it might be too late. It looks like Oxford Royale is betting on that line of thinking.
Pharos Education created and runs the MIT RAISE FutureBuilders program, which is where the curriculum comes from. Felipe Arango, CEO of Pharos, said that the students at Oxford Royale were one of the most international groups the program had ever worked with. That’s not just a boast—when you bring together students from more than 175 countries for a single summer program, you get a classroom with a really unique mix of cultural and economic views on technology. It’s likely that that makes the conversation about AI ethics more interesting and more difficult at the same time.
It matters what the curriculum is about in this case. The stated mission of MIT RAISE focuses a lot on ethical issues like fairness, accountability, and the effects of automated systems on society. That’s not the same thing as teaching teens how to talk to chatbots or code simple models. Not only what they can do with AI, but also how they think about it. It’s still not clear if two weeks in Oxford is enough time to make that stick.
Oxford Royale is not a charity that works on the basis of kindness. It was ranked 156th on the FT 1000 list of Europe’s fastest-growing companies in 2026. When you’re growing at that rate, you feel like you need to offer something unique, and a partnership with MIT is about the only thing that can make summer school stand out. It’s possible that the certificate and the time of the announcement are meant to market the program as well as teach it. It’s not always cynical to say that. Both things can be true at the same time.
The CEO of Oxford Royale, Andy Palmer, made it clear: the goal is for students to see AI not just as a tool, but as a force that will shape their future jobs and the world they’ll live in. That way of putting it is fair. For the same reason, institutions often use this language to show that they are taking things seriously. There are sixty spots available in two July sessions this summer. They will be a small test to see if that seriousness works in real life.
When you see this kind of partnership come together, you get the sense that education is really trying to catch up, which doesn’t always look graceful. But making mistakes early on is usually how you figure things out.
