Government unveils £1 million AI project set to support teachers and improve student performance

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.

Evidence shows that high quality feedback drives pupil performance, but marking is a huge drain on teacher time, according to the government.

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 that some tools could save up to 50 percent of the time spent on formative assessment, the government stated that this investment would allow teachers to spend more time on the work they entered the profession to do – inspiring students to learn.

These tools can assist in providing individual feedback on handwritten essays quickly and can identify common errors in students’ maths equations, and aim to balance 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 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.

“Such tools cannot replace the judgement and deep subject knowledge of a human expert, however, 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.”

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.

According to the government, training AI tools on the content store can increase feedback accuracy to 92 per cent, up from 67 per cent 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.