£1 million of funding awarded to 16 ed tech companies to build
teacher AI tools for feedback and marking, driving high and
rising education standards.
Kids are set to benefit from a better standard of teaching
through more face time with teachers – powered by AI – as the
Government sets the country on course to mainline AI into the
fabric of society, helping turbocharge our Plan for Change and
breaking down the barriers of opportunity.
£1 million has been set aside for 16 developers to create AI
tools to help with marking and generating detailed, tailored
feedback for individual students in a fraction of the time, so
teachers can focus on delivering brilliant lessons.
It comes immediately after the Prime Minister set out his plan to
harness the potential of AI to usher in a decade of national
renewal – using AI to drive growth and revolutionise our public
services.
Evidence shows that high quality feedback drives pupil
performance, but marking is a huge drain on teacher time.
The Prime Minister has today (Monday 13 January 2025) set out his
plan to harness the potential of AI to usher in a decade of
national renewal – using AI to drive growth and revolutionise our
public services.
Each of the tools will be targeted at a specific age and subject,
helping teachers with everything from marking handwritten English
and modern language work to providing feedback on maps and
diagrams drawn by geography students.
With developers estimating some tools could save time spent on
formative assessment by up to 50%, this investment means more
time for the work teachers got into the profession to deliver –
inspiring students to learn.
Whether its deciphering and delivering individual feedback on a
pile of handwritten essays at the click of a button or
automatically identifying common errors that students made in
maths equations to shape the next day's lesson, the tools retain
teacher oversight of the feedback – balancing AI efficiency with
crucial teacher expertise and judgement.
, Secretary of State for
Education, said:
Through our Plan for Change, we are determined to drive high and
rising standards across schools so we can break down the barriers
to opportunity. Giving every child a cutting-edge school
experience is a crucial part of our mission.
High quality teaching is the single biggest driver of high
standards in schools and through harnessing the potential of
artificial intelligence we can get teachers at the front of
classrooms doing what they do best – teaching.
The prototype AI tools, to be developed by April 2025, will draw
on a first-of-its-kind AI store of data to ensure accuracy – so
teachers can be confident in the information training the tools.
The world-leading content store, backed by £3 million funding
from the Department for Science, Innovation and Technology, will
pool and encode curriculum guidance, lesson plans and
anonymised pupil work which will then be used by AI companies to
train their tools to generate accurate, high-quality
content.
The project is the first of many that will transform how the
government uses public sector data – putting the information we
hold to work to improve outcomes for people across the country.
Technology Secretary, said:
AI has the power to transform education by helping teachers focus
on what they do best—teaching. This marks a real shift in how we
use technology to improve lives and unlock the near-boundless
potential of AI for our classrooms.
These 16 UK innovators, including start-ups and universities,
will develop cutting-edge AI tools that will drastically reduce
the time teachers spend marking homework and assessments, whether
it's geography charts, coding exercises, or written essays.
Through this approach, we're not only improving education but
also ensuring that our public sector services are world-class,
tackling inefficiencies, cutting down backlogs, and making
AI-driven progress a cornerstone of our Plan for Change.
Almost half of teachers are already using AI to help with their
work, according to a survey from TeacherTapp. However, most
AI tools are not specifically trained on the documents that set
out how teaching should work in England, and aren't accurate
enough to help teachers with their marking and feedback workload.
Training AI tools on the content store can increase feedback
accuracy to 92%, up from 67% when no targeted data was provided
to a large language model. That means teachers can be assured the
tools are safe and reliable for classroom use.
Daniel Appleby is cofounder of Summatic, which will use the
funding to develop a tool to transform feedback for maths
students in 16-19 education. The platform will assess areas of
weakness and create unlimited new questions for ongoing student
practice, driving up performance and improving educational
outcomes.
He said:
This funding marks a significant milestone in our mission to use
AI-enabled technology to deliver more equitable learning outcomes
for students across the United Kingdom, whilst alleviating the
marking and admin burden faced by teachers.”
