UK-based edtech startup aims to tackle workloads and improve staff retention in schools through innovative AI-powered marking solution for teachers.
Stylus, the UK-based startup using AI to automate the marking and feedback process in schools, has raised £500,000 in seed funding. Led by Sure Valley Ventures, a prominent AI-focused venture capital firm, the investment will support Stylus in scaling its platform to help alleviate the growing teacher workload crisis in the UK education sector.
The AI-driven platform, known as LearnCycle, combines automated marking with human-moderated feedback to streamline the traditionally time-consuming process of grading paper-based assessments. With this recent investment, Stylus aims to reduce teachers’ out-of-hours workloads and, in turn, address the ongoing teacher retention crisis.
Stylus secures funding for AI-powered marking solution
The UK’s education system faces severe challenges, with 40% of teachers leaving the profession within five years, often citing excessive workloads. Stylus seeks to address this problem by automating the marking of paper assessments, a task that currently requires teachers to work far beyond their contracted hours. By reducing the burden of marking, Stylus provides schools with a tool to retain teachers while maintaining high standards of personalised feedback for students.
Stylus founder and CEO Dominic Bristow, a former secondary school teacher, left the profession due to overwhelming workloads. Bristow noted, “In my experience, education leaders remain sceptical that strong staff retention and wellbeing in schools can coexist with high standards of marking and feedback. Through our work at Stylus, we intend to prove this a false dichotomy.”
The company was founded by Dominic Bristow and his non-executive partners David Blake and Julie Kilcoyne – known for their work founding, growing and selling ‘Boardworks’, a household name in UK schools.
AI in education: taking the work out of paperwork
Stylus’ LearnCycle platform uses advanced AI technology to process paper-based assessments. Teachers simply scan students’ papers, which are then marked by AI and moderated by freelance teachers. The results generate personalised reports for each student, offering targeted feedback while reducing the need for teachers to spend hours manually reviewing papers.
The platform is particularly suited for schools where online assessments are impractical, making Stylus a crucial tool in sectors relying on traditional paper-based exams. According to Bristow, “In a world of AI technologies, we can finally ‘take the work out of the paperwork’ for schools that outsource their exam marking to us, in conjunction with teacher moderation to ensure the highest quality output.”
By implementing Stylus’ technology, schools can save an estimated £17,000 of teacher time per subject, per year group, equating to approximately £750,000 in savings across an entire school.
Scaling up and preparing for launch
The funding secured by Stylus will be used to enhance the platform’s infrastructure, support marketing efforts, and conduct controlled trials ahead of its full launch in January 2025. The company has already seen positive feedback from early adopters, including large multi-academy trusts in both primary and secondary education.
Barry Downes, Managing Partner at Sure Valley Ventures, expressed confidence in Stylus’ potential, stating, “Stylus’ advanced Generative AI technology helps teachers dramatically improve their ability to tackle workloads, with significant implications for the educational landscape. At Sure Valley, we look for ambitious early-stage founders using cutting-edge technologies to solve large pain points for an industry they know inside out. We believe Dominic’s deep domain expertise across both teaching and education technology gives him a strong competitive advantage to succeed in this landscape. We see immense value in Dominic’s solution and are excited to back him at this early stage of his journey as he gears up for a full launch in January 2025.”
