Let Teachers SHINE Winner 2025: Tom Rye – Fast Feedback
A pioneering new online resource seeks to speed up the marking and feedback process for teachers and students using AI-driven technology.
Tom Rye, a London-based secondary school Vice Principal has received a Let Teachers SHINE award of £20,000 to develop Fast Feedback – an AI-powered platform that automates assessment, reducing teacher workload and bringing feedback to students more quickly.
The platform will be open source, making it an affordable solution for schools. Tom has already developed a prototype.
“Timely feedback is important for pupils to make progress, yet traditional marking is often infrequent and delayed,” explained Tom.
Time spent on marking and feedback contributes significantly to teachers’ overall workload. As he explains: “Marking is a time-consuming process that detracts from teachers’ ability to focus on responsive teaching.”
“Fast Feedback enables teachers to mark student work in minutes rather than hours, improving efficiency and giving them more time to focus on delivering high-quality teaching,” said Tom.
Additionally, by drastically reducing workload, Fast Feedback has the potential to support the wellbeing of staff – leading to greater retention of talented teachers that may otherwise burnout and choose to leave the profession.
Fast Feedback works by teachers uploading banks of questions and model answers which can then be assigned to students to complete. The platform then compares the teacher model with the student’s answers, scoring and grading the work.
Alongside marking the work, the platform also uses open-source AI to produce bespoke reteach tasks designed to help learners improve and deepen their subject knowledge.
“The application automates the marking process for both typed and multiple-choice questions,” said Tom. “Once areas for improvement are identified, students can respond to them through a ‘reteach’ section, where they complete a redrafting task generated by the AI.”
Tom believes that Fast Feedback can benefit disadvantaged learners in particular as it cuts down the time teachers need to spend on marking, allowing them to focus more on providing the formative feedback so essential to pupil progress.
Tom added: “As a social enterprise, Fast Feedback will be affordable for all schools because it won’t have the large membership fees associated with other EdTech platforms.”
On winning the award Tom commented: “I’m especially proud that this will support the creation of an open-source, accessible EdTech solution for schools that need it most.
“The funding from SHINE will allow me to take the platform to the next level,” he added. “I’ll be able to add new features, such as the ability to upload handwritten answers, and refine its impact in the classroom.”
Long term, Tom hopes Fast Feedback will become a widely used tool, making formative assessment more effective and manageable for teachers.
“Over the next 12 months, I aim to expand Fast Feedback into 10 more schools,” he said.
“I’m absolutely delighted. I’ve invested a huge amount of time developing Fast Feedback, working closely with teachers and pupils to shape it into a tool that genuinely supports learning.”