UK government education policy is being shaken up by a UK startup, which is leveraging AI to help teachers mark homework. Faculty AI is behind the government initiative, which pools data to create AI apps aimed at making a teacher's job easier.
Faculty AI, which worked with Vote Leave on the Brexit Referendum, last year won a £3m Department of Education contract to build a “content store”. The store is a database of curriculum and lesson plan data, including anonymised work from pupils.
From this database, developers will develop AI tools, such as AI tools for marking homework and planning lessons, to help ease the workload of teachers and innovate in the classroom. AI tools likely to be launched could help teachers with marking, planning lessons, or alleviating other time-consuming exercises.
Tom Nixon, managing director, applied AI, Faculty AI, says the “content store” concept has been positively received by teachers and could be used across other government departments.
For example, AI applications could be built from pooled data to help improve efficiencies across the Department for Environment, Food & Rural Affairs and Department for Energy Security and Net Zero. Nixon said the “content store’ concept had already been used as the blueprint behind the government's new National Data Library.
Nixon added:
“Our impression is that there are lots of other different areas of government for which that Content Store concept be applied, for either text content or potentially more numerical tabular content.
“To give some examples, things like geospatial data, and energy data, not personal customer energy data, but more the data about energy systems, things like agriculture, and agri-tech, and rules and regulations around agriculture.”
Faculty AI, founded in 2014, works with the UK government on different projects, including supplying data services to the NHS and providing services to the UK’s AI Institute. Nixon says Faculty AI remains committed to being headquartered in the UK, amid a backlash from some founders to a capital gains rise in the last budget which led to some to consider moving overseas. Nixon says Faculty AI is “extremely proud” to be a UK-headquartered AI startup.
He adds:
“We do now a lot of work in UK defence, where I think, being a UK firm, supporting the defence of the nation we see as extremely important in our UK identity.”
He said it was “entirely possible” that Faculty AI would open offices in overseas markets. Earlier this year, the UK government laid out its plans to use AI across the UK to boost growth and deliver services more efficiently. Nixon said Faculty AI, which has raised around £40m in total, was “extremely supportive” of the government's AI Action plan.
He said: "The focus on public service reform. I think there has been really good progress made in the last couple of years since the launch of ChatGPT around AI safety and positioning the UK as a leader for AI safety and standards.”
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