Contracts for Innovation: AI tools for education in Lancashire

This is a Contracts for Innovation competition funded by The Department for Education (DfE).

The aim of this competition is to develop tools which use generative AI to support teachers with assessing progress and providing feedback, known as formative assessment. These tools must support high quality education through evidence based teaching and learning approaches. These must align with relevant standards such as the National Curriculum or Early Years Foundation Stages (EYFS). Successful applicants will have access to a quality assured library of educational content and code optimised for use with large language models.

On average, teachers spend around 6 hours a week on marking, representing a significant proportion of teacher workloads. However, evidence from the Education Endowment Foundation (EEF) shows that individualised instruction and high quality feedback can significantly boost pupil progress. High quality AI tools have the potential to reduce the amount of time that teachers spend marking, whilst supporting effective feedback and tailored teaching which drive pupil progress.

There may be a potential for future funding to allow successful projects to undertake piloting, testing and validation of new or improved products, processes or services in environments representative of real-life operating conditions.

Only the successful applicants from this competition will be invited to potential future funding rounds.

In applying to this competition you are entering into a competitive process. This competition has a funding budget of up to £994,000, so we may not be able to fund all the proposed projects.

It may be the case that your project scores highly and receives positive comments from the assessors but we are still unable to fund it due to the portfolio approach we take. This means if two applications produce tools which address similar or identical areas of focus, for example, KS4 maths, we reserve the right to only award the highest scoring of the two and then proceed to award to the next highest scoring candidate.

Any adoption and implementation of a solution from this competition would be subject to a separate, possibly competitive, procurement exercise. This competition does not cover the purchase of any solution.

This competition closes at 11am UK time on the deadline stated in this Innovate UK competition brief. We cannot guarantee other government or third party sites will always show the correct competition information