With Scottish teachers regularly having to work overtime, the Scottish Directorate of Learning is collaborating with start-ups to resolve the issue of how technology can be used to reduce teacher workload.
In a demo day in Edinburgh, software development groups Zimplex.AI, Arcology, and Poteris CIC presented diverse solutions to this challenge. These range from tools to automate repetitive work outside of lessons, to platforms to streamline the reporting of behavioural incidents, to systems to help teachers support students with additional needs.
Sophie Finlayson, Digital Learning Team Leader at the Directorate for Learning, was responsible for outlining and presenting the challenge. Ahead of the event, she said that she hoped that the solutions would contribute to supporting wellness and contentment in schools.
She said: “We know that increased workload has negative impacts on teachers’ wellbeing, but also that that will cascade throughout the school and [affect] the pupils themselves, so a solution in this space will ultimately help learners as well as teachers.
“This challenge needs to be solved because… we want people to view teaching as an attractive, rewarding profession, and addressing the workload issue will help that be the case.”
She added: “I think the really exciting thing about the challenge is getting someone else’s perspective on something that we as government have been looking at for a really long time.”
The demo day was organised by CivTech, the Scottish Government programme that brings public, private, and third sector organisations together to develop technical solutions to issues affecting ordinary people. To reach this stage, the selected teams were required to submit a proposed solution to the problem highlighted by the Directorate of Learning then further develop their proposal hand-in-hand with the directorate, before undergoing a period of intense fast-track product development.
One solution presented was “Guru”, a tool built by Zimplex.AI to cut down the time teachers spend on operational admin, such as setting targets, recommending pathways, and setting grade boundaries.
It does this by storing information from spreadsheets, documents, and live websites, and allowing for free, unlimited natural-language searches across this content. It also produces ready-to-use outputs from the data, and recommends tasks to automate. The application will go live this summer, and will be available to Scottish teachers, with plans to scale across the UK and beyond.
Another presentation was given by Arcology, which produced “Cairn”. This permits staff to describe behavioural incidents in their own words, with the AI-powered technology putting together a formal report based on this summary as well as a teacher’s answers to a series of relevant follow-up questions.
Alongside creating a report, it also fills out the required compliance fields across each system, drafts parent communications, and sets out follow-up actions, with each required action being assigned to the appropriate staff member. This would mean that a task that often takes up to 90 minutes to resolve would be completed in less than 10, Arcology say.
Cairn is set to complete school pilots in Scotland in 2026, with Arcology intending to raise the funds to bring the product to full commercial readiness in the same period. It aims to begin its commercial rollout across Scottish and other UK schools from 2027, and expand into the UK care sector, international education markets, and other regulated sectors supporting vulnerable people by 2028.
Finally, Poteris CIC presented “Chalk Access”, a platform which allows teachers to better coordinate on developing, implementing and aligning evidence-based strategies for students with special educational needs.
This comes as 43% of students in Scotland are classed as having additional support needs, and teachers report spending three hours per week on ways to support them. A pilot of the technology is now underway in nine schools, with the aim being to have at least 12 local authorities onboarded by the end of 2027.
CivTech was launched in 2016, and in that time has helped over 100 businesses develop products, with 80% of the products developed through the programme now in use.