From cautious to curious: how teachers are responding to AI marking

What’s your first thought when you hear the words ‘AI marking assistant’? If it’s a sceptical one, then you’re not alone.  

There's been a lot of conversation recently about the role of Artificial Intelligence (AI) technology in teaching and education. Does it have a place and, if so, how far should it go? It's a debate worth having. According to the National Education Union's 2026 survey of over 9,000 teachers, two thirds of secondary school teachers worry that AI use  is affecting pupils' critical thinking skills, part of a wider concern researchers call 'cognitive offloading', where we lean on external tools to do thinking we'd otherwise do ourselves. It's a fair worry, and it's exactly why the way an AI tool is designed matters so much. 

If you're weighing up where AI fits in your school more broadly, our AI in education resource hub is a good place to start. 

It's clear that there's a real, valid concern about handing too much over to the technology, which may explain why just 7% of teachers currently use AI tools for marking. However, that figure is growing quickly, having doubled among secondary school teachers within the last year, but it's clear that most teachers are proceeding carefully. So, when we developed our own AI marking assistant and feedback tool within Access GCSEPod, we knew we had to get it right.  

In our early conversations with teachers about this feature, the interest was clear – but there were questions about control and trust. What shifted that caution to curiosity was a simple principle: this tool is built with a teacher-in-the-loop design. The AI suggests the feedback, but you decide what goes back to the student. This isn’t AI designed to replace your judgement, it’s there to support you in your workflow. 

We know that talking about this isn't enough, so in this article, we're going to show you what the data says, how the tool actually works, and what teachers have made of it so far. 

We'll start with the headline news: 99.1% of the AI's suggested marks and feedback are accepted by teachers.  

That includes teachers who accepted the mark and feedback as it was given, as well as those who accepted the mark but made a few tweaks to the feedback before sending it on. Teachers are looking at what the AI has produced and deciding they're happy to send it to their students. Given how much we know that teachers care about their students and their learning, this wouldn't be happening if there were any doubts about the quality.  

The acceptance rate  doesn't just tell us the tool is accurate. It tells us that teachers are using their professional judgement and deciding that it meets their standards. Whether they read every word of the feedback or trusted the suggestion and moved on to the next student, the outcome is the same: the AI's marking is aligning with what they would have expected to see. But we know that accuracy is only half the battle; what teachers really need back is time.

One teacher told us that marking a single piece of homework, with individual feedback for every student, used to take around 20 to 30 minutes. With our AI marking assistant, that dropped to 10 to 15 minutes, and they found the feedback was actually more personalised than what they'd been able to produce under time pressure. Another teacher put it even more simply: the tool cut their marking time in half. 

But the time is only where it starts. What that time buys is the thing teachers rarely get to give consistently: feedback that's frequent, personal and specific, for every student. Students see exactly where they went wrong and what to do next, while the work is still fresh, which hopefully leads to better learning.  

Behind the scenes, the AI draws on mark schemes and model answers s built into each question of the assignments, where they're available. This means that marking is aligned with the expected standard and what a good answer actually looks like. Specifically, it: 

• Crafts feedback for each individual student's response, comparing it to the model answer and marking it against the criteria provided 
• Flags spelling and grammar errors separately, so teachers can highlight these to the student if they feel it's needed 
• Explains why each mark was awarded, visible only to the teacher, so you can check the reasoning behind the number before anything is sent on 

It's not just producing a mark, it's showing its working, so you can make a more informed decision. 

Knowing what the AI can and can't see matters just as much as knowing what it can do. 

• The AI knows nothing about the student. It can't see any personal data or any information about the individual.  
• The only thing it sees is the question and the student's response.  
• It never takes or uses any more data than it needs to do its job. 

And the teacher always has the final say.  

Nothing is ever sent to a student without being reviewed and approved by a teacher first. No exceptions.   

Since the tool has been live, we’ve been keen to see how teachers have been responding, and a few key themes have been coming through.  

The first is quality. One teacher found that the tool enabled them to provide high-quality, personalised feedback across a wide range of student work, quickly and consistently. The point isn’t just speed; it’s the ability to give every student the standard of feedback they deserve and that you’d want to give if you had more time. 

 And that quality opens the door to something else. Another teacher told us that being able to offer more frequent and thorough feedback had also helped their students to develop the breadth and depth of their answers. That is the outcome every teacher is surely looking for, and the one that time pressure makes increasinly difficult to give consistently, , and that's exactly the gap the AI marking assistant is designed to fill. 

Teachers using the tool are  responding positively and telling us how helpful and time-saving it’s been for them. One teacher described the AI generated feedback as a ‘game changer’ , and another expected the tool to meaningfully reduce their workload, and so anticipated using it regularly.  

That’s more than just a positive reaction. It’s teachers integrating this into how they work; making active choices about the feedback being offered by the AI and what happens next and  finding that it fits naturally into their existing workflow rather than disrupting it for the sake of change. 

We believe that AI does have its place in education, but that it only works when teachers and students stay at the centre of it. Go back to that Sunday evening: the stack of homework, the clock against you. That's the moment the AI Marking Assistant is built for. The admin is handled. The decisions are yours. The technology does the heavy lifting but the judgement, the part that only you can bring, stays with you. 

Our software experts at Access Education are committed to developing meaningful tools that support and earn the trust of teachers, that are transparent in how they work, and that make a genuine difference to both your workload and your students' learning. 

If you’re an Access GCSEPod customer and haven't tried the AI marking assistant and feedback tool yet, we'd love for you to see it for yourself and, as always, let us know what you think!  

If you're weighing GCSEPod against other options, see how GCSEPod compares with other GCSE revision resources, or request your demo today.