Feedback Without Burnout: Why Respond Starts Where the Evidence Starts

Why feedback feels broken for teachers

If you’ve taught for more than a term, you already know the truth: marking is one of the biggest drains on teacher time, wellbeing, and presence.

The problem is not feedback itself. It is that feedback has become tangled up with marking — long evenings, green pens, and a workload spiral that quietly eats into planning time, energy, and the joy that brought us into teaching in the first place.

What the evidence says about written feedback

The Education Endowment Foundation (EEF) puts it bluntly in their Teacher Feedback to Improve Pupil Learning guidance report: written feedback is time-consuming and often brings a substantial “opportunity cost” — hours that could have been spent planning better explanations, improving lessons, or simply returning home as a functioning human being.

And yet, feedback matters. Students deserve precise, timely, actionable guidance — one of the most powerful drivers of learning we have.

This tension — the need for meaningful feedback and the impossibility of supplying it at scale without sacrificing your life — is the reason we built Respond. This post marks the beginning of our public launch, and we are acutely aware that teachers and parents are trusting us with something precious.

So let’s start where the evidence starts.

The EEF’s challenge: written feedback has value, but enormous cost

The EEF’s recommendation 4 is deceptively simple: use written feedback judiciously and time-efficiently. But behind that line is a decade of research showing that feedback is most effective when it is specific and actionable, but written comments take a huge amount of time, and much of that time is spent producing feedback pupils won’t read, won’t understand, or won’t act on.

If we’re honest, many teachers carry the guilt of unfinished marking or hurried comments. It’s not laziness — it’s the simple arithmetic of the job. You can’t produce personalised comments for 150 students per week and also remain energised, creative, and present.

Parents feel the gap too. Most want more feedback, not less. They want to know their child is seen. They want reassurance that small misunderstandings are caught early.

Right now, the system struggles to give that. Teachers aren’t robots. But ironically, robots can help.

Where Respond App begins: freeing teachers from the burden that steals presence

Respond App is built on a simple conviction: teachers should spend their classroom time interacting with students, not buried in marking. This is not a slogan — it’s a structural decision.

First, Respond automates the heavy, repetitive parts of written marking. Instead of a teacher deciphering thirty versions of the same two-mark question late at night, Respond analyses the responses, interprets the mark scheme, and produces feedback in seconds. The written feedback is task-specific, concept-focused, aligned to curriculum and mark schemes, and immediately available to pupils.

Second, it gives teachers back their evenings — and their in-lesson presence. When marking no longer consumes the week, teachers arrive in lessons better prepared, more attentive, and more emotionally available. The human work of teaching becomes possible again: circulating and supporting, reading the room, responding to misconceptions in the moment, building relationships, enjoying teaching. You can feel the difference instantly. Students can feel it too.

Third, it lets teachers use feedback, not just produce it. EEF research emphasises that feedback only works when pupils receive and act on it. Written comments they read a week later rarely change learning. Respond delivers feedback fast enough that teachers can build redrafting tasks into the very next lesson, run whole-class feedback based on automated misconception summaries, pair students for peer discussion using AI-detected patterns, and spot emerging issues before they become gaps. The teacher stays in control. The AI simply makes the invisible visible.

What this means for parents

Parents deserve something that’s often missing from ed-tech launch stories: reassurance. This is not an app designed to replace teachers. It is designed to support teachers to know your child better.

First, Respond gives your child faster, clearer feedback. Instead of waiting days or weeks for marked books to come back, students receive guidance quickly — often the same day. Small misunderstandings don’t grow into big gaps.

Second, feedback becomes more personalised, not less. Because the app handles the mechanical marking, teachers have more time to notice the nuances: why your child might be stuck, what misconception they keep repeating, which questions hide strengths that linear marking misses. The teacher, not the AI, remains the expert interpreter.

Third, teachers are more present, less stressed, and more able to help your child. If an app can reduce marking hours by even 20%, the effect on teacher wellbeing is dramatic. Happier, more focused teachers deliver better lessons. Your child feels that difference every day. Respond doesn’t distance teachers from your children. It frees them to be more attentive to your children.

Being honest: this is new, and it won’t always be perfect

We’re proud of what Respond can do. We believe deeply in our mission and in the research that underpins it. But we’re also humble.

This is new technology. There will be moments when a feature behaves unexpectedly, when a marking decision seems odd, when we miss something. Every teacher who uses Respond is helping us build something that has never existed before.

We will get things wrong. And we will fix them. Fast.

We want teachers and parents to feel like collaborators — early adopters who get to help shape something powerful, practical, and humane. Because it isn’t AI that will transform feedback. It’s teachers using AI well. It’s communities building tools that serve learning, not replace it.

A new starting point for teaching — aligned with evidence, focused on presence

The EEF’s guidance makes one idea very clear: feedback isn’t about producing more comments. It’s about producing better learning.

Respond App begins by addressing the most stubborn barrier between the two: the time-cost of written marking.

By taking on the task that drains teachers most, Respond makes space for the work that matters most:

That’s the heart of teaching. And it’s what Respond is built to protect.

This is the start of something new, something hopeful. And we’re thrilled to have you — teachers, parents, students — with us from day one. If you’re ready to be part of this journey, we’re ready to walk it with you.

• conversations
• explanations
• modelling
• clarifying
• noticing
• guiding
• celebrating
• human presence