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Insights, tips, and updates for UK secondary teachers using AI in the classroom.
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The Part of the AI Marking Debate We Keep Missing
The AI marking debate is often framed as a choice between slow but personal human feedback and fast but impersonal automation. The more useful model is different: AI drafts first, and the teacher reviews, adjusts and approves what the student actually sees.
What Makes Teach Edge Different from Other AI Marking Tools
Most AI marking tools stop at one script at a time. Teach Edge is built as an end-to-end assessment workflow for UK secondary teachers — from setting a task, to student submission, to draft marks and feedback, to teacher review, tracking, and reporting.
Differentiation without rewriting everything: introducing the Scaffolding Assistant
Create Low, Low+, Medium and High support versions of the same exam question in minutes — with scaffolds aligned to your marking criteria, not generic 'helpful' prompts.
Why Essay Marks Are Less Certain Than We Pretend
Reflecting on my experience as a teacher and edtech founder, this essay explores why essay marking is noisier than we like to admit — and why the most valuable part of judgement is often the feedback, not the mark.
Latest Posts
We Have Known for Decades That Tutoring Works. The Question Was Always Scale.
For decades, schools have known that one-to-one tutoring can be transformative. The real issue was never whether it worked, but how to bring more of that personalised support into ordinary classrooms at scale.
AI Didn't Save Me Any Time. And That Was the Point
AI can save teachers time. But its more interesting value may be elsewhere. Sometimes the real benefit is helping you think more clearly about why students are getting stuck, and how to teach something better.
Claude CoWork: You've Been Chatting With AI. Here's What Happens When It Can Actually Do Things
Anthropic's Cowork moves AI beyond the chat box and into real multi-step work. Here's what that looks like for teachers, where it could help, and where caution still matters.
The Map Has Changed. Are We Still Teaching Students to Read the Old One?
As AI shifts research from navigation to conversation, the challenge for schools is no longer just teaching students to evaluate sources. It is teaching them to notice framing, ask better questions and recognise what a conversational interface may be leaving out.
What students actually think about AI marking and feedback
King's School, Chester ran an independent student voice survey on TeachEdge after around 18 months of use. Here's what 148 students said about clarity, speed, progress, and trust in marking.
AI Doesn't Automatically Reduce Your Workload. It Changes It.
A recent Harvard Business Review piece found that when people adopt generative AI, workload often intensifies rather than falls. For teachers, that is a warning worth hearing early, before AI quietly turns every spare minute into more tasks.
Stop Trying to Catch Them: Why AI Detection is a Dead End for UK Secondary Schools
AI detection tools cannot reliably prove whether a GCSE or A Level student used generative AI. Schools will get further by modelling good AI use and protecting supervised writing time.
From Chatbot to Co-Worker: What "Agentic AI" Actually Means for Teachers
Agentic AI sounds like jargon, but it points to a real shift: systems that can plan and take steps to complete a task, not just reply to a prompt. Here is what that means in classroom terms, and what to look for when you are choosing tools.
What 200,000 marking decisions taught me about how we mark essays
After two years building an AI marking platform used by 400+ teachers, I've noticed consistent patterns in how marks get adjusted, where judgement calls cluster, and what actually helps pupils improve. The biggest surprise wasn't about accuracy. It was about feedback and time.
What I Tell Students About the Future of Work
After reading A World Without Work, I noticed the same unease showing up in my classroom. This is the practical, honest way I talk to students about automation, careers, and the skills that still matter.
The DfE says use AI responsibly. What does that mean in practice?
The DfE's AI guidance is sensible, but it's light on what do we do on a Tuesday night with 30 essays. Here's a practical playbook for responsible AI-assisted marking, plus a copy/paste one-page policy template.
Why raw AI chatbots can mislead when you ask them to mark exam essays
ChatGPT-style tools can give confident, plausible feedback. The problem is that they can over-mark exam essays because they don't reliably apply level-of-response mark schemes. Here's a simple Edexcel A Level Economics experiment that shows why.