More time for teaching. Clearer next steps for every writer.

How Alec Hunter Academy is reducing English marking workload while giving students precise, actionable feedback

Alec Hunter Academy is a large 11-16 secondary school in Braintree, Essex. Like many schools around the country, school leaders were looking for innovative ways of reducing workload for teachers — so upon learning about stylus through PiXL, they decided to sign up as a discovery school, beginning with GCSE English.

Why English?

English teachers mark a huge volume of work, so the team were keen to see how AI could save them time. They also wondered how AI might support marking in an inherently subjective assessment framework, where moderation sessions often revealed disagreement over the final score.

Reducing workload and saving teachers hours of time would support teacher recruitment, more important than ever in the midst of a recruitment crisis — but leaders at Alec Hunter also knew that this could not come at the expense of students receiving all the feedback they need. The ideal solution needed both to reduce workload and provide the same level of insight and quality of feedback that the most effective teachers could generate.

With an initial focus on formative feedback, the team at Alec Hunter identified two classes with whom to trial stylus‘ marking service. Students completed exam-style essays on stylus-headed paper, which teachers then bulk-scanned and returned for marking by email.

Marking with stylus

Papers then entered the stylus marking pipeline, where a combination of AI and expert teacher-moderators transcribed the essays, marked them, and then generated personalised feedback reports for each student.

Teachers received class-level feedback outlining how their class performed against each marking topic. In order to remove workload, rather than simply reduce it, it was vital that class reports offered enough detail for teachers to feel they could plan targeted follow-up lessons without having to re-read every essay.

Feedback also needed to capture the systematic thought processes taking place in a teacher’s mind when they marked. This was achieved by identifying almost 100 individual marking judgements, applied to each paper in turn.

Each judgement sits within a topic — adapted from the Assessment Objectives covered at GCSE. This level of granularity means the feedback from students can go beyond simply telling them to ‘Explore effects of methods’ or ‘Link to context’, instead pinning down precise skills to improve.

Impact

Alec Hunter students are about to complete their third round of feedback, with praise from both students and teachers.

To mimic the effective feedback processes taking place at Alec Hunter, Jen and Courtney suggested adding specific ‘Next steps’ targets for each student, to follow the ‘Even Better If’ and provide actionable follow-up tasks.

With these now incorporated into every student report, the focus is next on turning granular marking judgements into an overall level for each student.