AI teacher tools set to break down barriers to opportunity
Source: gov.uk (2025-01-13)

£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.

Bridget Phillipson, 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, Peter Kyle 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.”

DfE media enquiries

Central newsdesk - for journalists xx-xxxx-xxxx