The Department for Education (DfE) is making £1 million available to support developers in creating AI tools to help with marking and feedback in England’s schools.
It said that each of the 16 tools will be targeted at a specific age and subject and that prototypes are expected to be developed by April of this year.
They will draw on an AI store of data, backed by £3 million from the Department of Science, Technology and Innovation (DSIT), to ensure the accuracy of information used in training their algorithms It will pool and encode guidance on the school curriculum, lesson plans and anonymised pupil work that can be used by AI companies to train their tools.
DfE said these could perform activities such as providing individual feedback on handwritten essays, identifying common errors in maths equations and shaping lessons. They would all retain teacher oversight of the feedback to ensure their judgement and expertise would still be applied.
Raise standards
Secretary of State for Education Bridget Phillipson 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.”
DfE said that, according to a survey carried out through the TeacherTapp app, almost half of teachers are already using AI to help with their work. But most AI tools are not specifically trained on the documents that set out how teaching should work in England, and are not accurate enough to help teachers with their marking and feedback workload.
It added that 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.
Transform education
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.”
The announcement was made shortly after Prime Minister Sir Keir Starmer set out a plan to boost the development and application of AI and use it to transform public services. He identified education as one of the areas in which it could be particularly valuable.
