The announcement comes as part of the prime minister’s AI Opportunities Action Plan – unveiled this week (DSIT, 2025) – which the government hopes will drive growth and improve public services.
The £1m has been earmarked 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”. The government hopes the tools will cut the time spent marking homework and assessments.
The Department for Education (DfE) confirmed this week that the tools will be targeted at a specific ages and subjects. Examples cited include tools helping teachers to:
- Mark handwritten work in English or modern language subjects.
- Provide feedback on maps and diagrams drawn by geography students.
- Identify common errors made in maths equations to inform lesson-planning.
The first prototype tools are to be developed by April and will draw upon a £3m AI data store that has been created by the Department for Science, Innovation and Technology.
The store is pooling and encoding curriculum guidance, lesson plans and anonymised pupil work and assessments that can be used by AI companies to train their tools to generate “accurate, high-quality content”.
The 16 developers include start-ups and universities. One of the developers is Summatic, which is using its funding to develop a tool to support feedback for maths students in 16 to 19 education. Co-founder Daniel Appleby said that the platform will assess areas of weakness and create new questions for on-going student practice.
The DfE said this week: “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.”
The DfE is hopeful that the investment will have a significant impact on teacher marking and lesson-planning workload and it expects some of the tools to cut time spent on formative assessment by half.
A study undertaken by the National Foundation for Educational Research (NFER) last term found that teachers using ChatGPT reduced the time they spent planning lessons by 31%. While a typical teacher not using AI spent 82 minutes a week preparing lessons and resources for year 7 and 8 science lessons, teachers in the study’s ChatGPT group spent around 56 minutes a week (Roy et al, 2024).
Ben Styles, head of classroom practice and workforce at NFER, said that the time saving achieved in the study “appears to have been without any reduction in lesson quality”, although added that more research would be required to be certain of this.
Commenting on the DfE’s announcement this week, he continued: “It will be interesting to explore how AI can benefit other aspects of teacher workload, like marking and administration. These tasks probably represent a greater burden, and we look forward to exploring the potential for AI to make impacts here too.”
A separate study by exam board Trinity College London, published last year, found that two-thirds of teachers said generic AI tools are too unreliable and inaccurate for them to be used effectively in the classroom. Despite this, 23% of teachers were still using AI to help them with their work. Likewise, a recent TeacherTapp poll found that almost half of the teachers who responded are already using AI.
Paul Whiteman, general secretary of the National Association of Head Teachers, said that given high levels of workload “it makes sense” to explore the use of AI. He said it had potential to make “some written tasks quicker and easier for teachers” and that these “could include marking and lesson planning”.
However, he warned that teachers must retain their professional oversight: “Such tools cannot replace the judgement and deep subject knowledge of a human expert, and it will be vital that teachers retain professional oversight as pledged in these plans.
“School leaders and teachers need training and guidance in order to feel confident using AI, and the technology should be introduced gradually in order to maximise its potential and mitigate the risks.”
- DSIT: Independent report: AI Opportunities Action Plan, 2025: www.gov.uk/government/publications/ai-opportunities-action-plan
- Roy et al: ChatGPT in lesson preparation: Teacher Choices trial, EEF (NFER), 2024: www.nfer.ac.uk/publications/chatgpt-in-lesson-preparation-a-teacher-choices-trial/