Let’s Give Teachers Their Time Back. Because Students Deserve It.

Gavin Cooney, Co-Founder & CEO of Learnosity, looks at the role AI-driven solutions can play in improving teacher well-being and retention.

Talk to any teacher, and a pattern quickly emerges: they’re overwhelmed. Not by the students, teachers love the teaching. It’s everything else. The admin. The marking. The paperwork. It’s relentless.

Some of my closest friends went into teaching to ignite curiosity, to see that lightbulb moment in a child’s eyes. But instead, they’re spending weekends buried in marking. The joy of the job is being drowned in red ink and spreadsheets.

So we set out to understand just how deep this problem runs. Our latest research confirmed what many feared: it’s unsustainable.

Over half (52%) of UK teachers have considered leaving the profession because of marking workloads. A third (34%) are losing sleep over it. This isn’t just an admin issue, it’s a serious wellbeing issue.

I’ve been there. I used to lecture, and even back then, before class sizes exploded and expectations surged, it was hard. That experience continues to shape how I think about the role of technology in education: it should support, not replace.

Technology Has Caught Up With the Problem
When we launched Learnosity in 2007, we had a clear goal: to build tools that lifted the burden on teachers, not replaced them.

Today, with the leaps we’ve made in AI, we finally have the tools to make a meaningful difference.
Let’s be clear: AI doesn’t replace teachers. It gives them something they desperately need: time.
Time to plan better lessons. Time to give meaningful feedback. Time to connect with students. Time to breathe.

And when teachers get more time, students benefit too. Lessons improve. Feedback gets sharper. One-to-one moments become possible again. That’s the power of giving time back.

A Breaking Point We Can’t Ignore

Teachers are spending an average of 8.2 hours a week on marking. Nearly nine in ten (87%) take that work home. Over a third feel overwhelmed (35%) or exhausted (42%) by the workload. And it’s only getting worse, 67% say marking has increased over the past year.

If the system is driving half of our teachers toward the exit, the question isn’t whether change is needed. It’s why we haven’t acted already.

AI as a Sidekick, Not a Substitute
With any new technology, there’s a fear that jobs are on the line. But we’ve seen this story before. The arrival of calculators. Textbooks. MOOCs. Each time, the doomsday headlines came, and each time, teachers remained essential.

Utilising AI-driven solutions isn’t about replacing teachers. It’s about removing the repetitive grunt work so they can focus on what only humans can do: inspire, motivate, and connect.

And right now, most marking tech stops at the basics- automating multiple choice or true/false. That’s fine for some assessments. But the moment you want to assign an open-ended project, a critical essay, or authentic tasks that drive deeper learning, traditional systems buckle.

The Power of Seamless Integration

What’s changing now is the way AI is being built into the infrastructure of edtech. Instead of clunky, standalone tools, the future lies in API-based solutions. No extra logins, no duplicate data entry, no need to learn an entirely new system.

But integration isn’t just about convenience. It also raises important considerations around authentication protocols, data privacy, and platform compatibility. Especially in education, where safeguarding is paramount.

Done well, it makes AI invisible but invaluable.

Of course, accuracy matters. Any use of AI in assessment must meet high standards of accuracy and fairness.

One commonly used metric in this space is the Quadratic Weighted Kappa (QWK), which measures agreement between two graders (in this case, human versus AI). It penalises larger discrepancies more heavily than small ones, and accounts for agreement by chance. A high QWK score (above 0.8) indicates that an AI system can match expert-level grading reliability.

This means teachers can assign meaningful work, knowing the feedback will be accurate, credible, and delivered at speed. And they can go home on time.

This Is the Moment

The data couldn’t be clearer:
• 73% of teachers say they’d embrace AI tools if it meant halving their marking workload.
• 52% say reducing that load would lower their stress and burnout.
• 45% say it would improve their work-life balance.

Marking might not be the only challenge teachers face. But it is one we can solve right now.

AI won’t fix everything, but it can make a real dent in a very real problem, right when teacher burnout is peaking.

By Gavin Cooney, Co-Founder & CEO of Learnosity