January 2025: stylus, the startup set to revolutionise teacher workloads with its AI-powered marking and feedback, has been chosen as one of the providers in the £994,000 Contracts for Innovation competition funded by the Department for Education.
The aim of the competition is to develop tools which use generative AI to support teachers with assessing progress and providing feedback, known as formative assessment. The chosen tools must support high-quality education through evidence-based teaching and learning approaches.
Unlike most education providers who supply AI marking tools for teachers themselves to use, stylus instead offers schools the marked work itself — using nothing but paper. This means instead of making existing work quicker, it can be taken away completely — freeing up time for planning targeted follow-up lessons.
The funding provided by the DfE will allow stylus to develop a new writing feedback tool for Key Stage 3, focused on developing students’ accuracy and cohesion in handwritten work. As well as providing insight for teachers, the tool will offer students personalised feedback and follow up tasks, while also allowing for translation into other languages.
stylus’ AI-marked, human-moderated feedback solution, LearnCycle, addresses the recruitment and retention crisis in education by removing whole swathes of out-of-hours work associated with marking the assessments that students complete on paper. In doing so it aims to help schools to retain teachers while maintaining high standards of feedback.
The UK education sector is currently facing significant challenges related to teacher recruitment and retention. Statistics show that 40% of new teachers leave the profession within five years, with 92% of these citing high workload as the primary reason. This crisis is impacting schools' ability to maintain high-quality education standards, as some schools resort to giving no written feedback at all to ensure their teachers’ wellbeing.
stylus uses a combination of narrowly focussed and broad scope AI strategies to mark and analyse paper-based assessments at scale. These papers can be administered for entire year groups or individual pupils. Once completed, teachers scan the papers in bulk, which are then processed through AI-driven marking and accuracy optimisation, with freelance teacher markers moderating the work to ensure the quality of the feedback remains high.
The results are used to generate personalised student reports, providing immediate and actionable feedback. Teachers can review and moderate digitised versions of their students' work, with strengths and areas for improvement highlighted to inform future lessons. This approach provides the data required for even more personalised teaching whilst simultaneously giving teachers the time they need to properly implement it. stylus’ platform is unique as it brings the power of AI technologies to bear on the workload problem where schools need it most - in the assessments students must complete on paper without devices or internet access, where no online solution can support teachers.
Schools wishing to take part in the project are invited to register their interest here.
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