Government unveils £1 million AI project set to support teachers and improve student performance
by Educate Magazine January 14, 2025 · All News / Education News
The government announced that £1 million has been set aside for 16 developers to create artificial intelligence (AI) tools to help with marking and generating detailed, tailored feedback for individual students.
This has come after Prime Minister Keir Starmer set out his plan to harness the potential of AI – using it to drive growth and revolutionise the UK’s public services.
“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 an AI store of data to ensure accuracy – so teachers can be confident in the information training the tools, according to the government.
Backed by £3 million funding from the Department for Science, Innovation and Technology, the content store 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 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.
Commenting on the news, Paul Whiteman, general secretary at school leaders’ union NAHT, said: “Teachers are struggling with enormous amounts of workload, so it makes sense to explore AI’s potential to make some written tasks quicker and easier for teachers – and these could include marking and lesson planning.
