Stylus’ platform, LearnCycle, offers an AI-marked, human-moderated feedback system that tackles the ongoing teacher recruitment and retention crisis by drastically reducing the out-of-hours marking burden. This approach helps schools retain educators without compromising on feedback quality.

Teacher shortages in the UK are severe, with 40% of new teachers leaving the profession within five years, largely due to excessive workloads. In some cases, schools have scaled back written feedback entirely to safeguard teacher well-being. Stylus aims to address this issue with its AI-powered solution, capable of marking paper-based assessments at scale. Teachers scan bulk assessments, which are processed by AI for accuracy and moderation by freelance educators. This ensures high-quality, personalised feedback, allowing teachers to focus more on teaching rather than administrative tasks.

The platform generates detailed reports, highlighting strengths and areas for improvement, providing teachers with the data needed to tailor future lessons. LearnCycle’s design is particularly impactful as it supports traditional paper-based assessments, a gap where digital solutions typically fall short. By cutting down on marking time, schools can save an average of £17,000 in teacher time per year group, per subject, which can amount to £750,000 in savings across an entire school.

Founded by Dominic Bristow, a former physics teacher who left the classroom to explore better solutions for teacher workload, Stylus has gained early traction, working with several multi-academy trusts across the UK and amassing a growing waitlist.

With the new funding, Stylus plans to scale its infrastructure to meet demand, run controlled trials, develop case studies, and prepare for a full launch to educational institutions by January 2025.

Dominic Bristow, CEO and Founder, Stylus Education said: “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. I have been working on this problem space since I reluctantly left the classroom for a life without marking 10 years ago, but it’s taken until this point for a solution to be truly viable. Although I made some headway in the past with products that amplified the effort teachers spent marking, what we really lacked was a way of making decisions about students’ work on behalf of their teachers.

“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. At the same time, we can provide students with exciting new educational opportunities via the unprecedented level of detail in our marking output, and the sheer volume of marking we can handle for schools. We have been delighted by the positive reaction of our early adopters, and we’re thrilled to bring Sure Valley Ventures onboard, who are fully aligned with our long-term vision.”

Barry Downes, Managing Partner, Sure Valley Ventures, added: “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.”