• Stylus secures investment from Sure Valley Ventures to take the ‘work’ out of ‘paperwork’ in schools
• UK-based stylus offers a cutting edge AI-powered service to the education sector which automates the marking and personalised feedback of paper-based assessments
• Founded by a former secondary school teacher who himself left the profession due to the overwhelming workload, stylus’ technology aims to address the recruitment and retention crisis in education, whilst helping to improve standards
• The round was led by Sure Valley Ventures, an AI-focused VC firm

5th September: stylus, the startup set to revolutionise teacher workloads with its AI-powered marking and feedback, has raised £500,000 in a recent funding round. The investment was made by Sure Valley Ventures, an AI-focused venture capital firm which supports early-stage companies to scale.

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.

Teachers in the UK are currently expected to work far beyond their full-time role in terms of hours, with estimates that they need to work around 180% of their full-time contracted workload to maintain a base level of ‘Good’ teaching. This workload, however, increases further with the marking required for interim assessments and mock exams, adding roughly 40 extra hours of work every six weeks. By using LearnCycle, schools can save an average of £17,000 of teacher time per year group per subject, which implies around £750,000 of time saving once deployed across the whole school.

The company was founded by Dominic Bristow, a data-loving physics teacher who, despite being a devout educationist and successful teacher / middle leader, left the classroom 10 years ago to pursue a better solution than countless hours holding a red pen. Since then, he has worked across various roles within edtech, including educational data analysis, school improvement and product innovation, before founding Stylus late last year when the opportunities of vision technology finally provided the key to the solution he had been working on for a decade. Stylus has seen positive early traction, working with early adopters including large multi-academy trusts of both secondary and primary schools across the UK, and attracting a growing waitlist.

Stylus will use the funding to improve its existing infrastructure for scaling to meet high demand from schools, conduct controlled trials and develop case studies with prominent school groups and educational leaders. It will also be used to support marketing efforts ahead of the service going live to all education institutions in 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.”

About Stylus Education

Stylus helps schools leverage the power of AI to reduce teacher workload, through a combination of school-specialised AI training and an AI-powered marking service. 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. The stylus founding team has e over 50 years of experience in the education sector between them. Dominic is joined on his executive team by Hannah Gillott (Director of Schools) and Tom Valsler (Director of Product), who worked together at the industry thought-leading La Salle Education, and who deeply understand the requirements of the schools and students that will be supported by stylus’ products and services.

Schools and Academy Trusts interested in becoming pre-launch ‘Discovery Partners’ can leave their details here