From Classroom Burnout to AI-Driven EdTech: The stylus Journey

Dominic Bristow began his career as a physics teacher in the UK. According to stylus's website, he later left the classroom because the marking workload had become untenable:

"Our founder, Dominic Bristow, was one of them. … He believed AI might be the answer to the Catch-22 at the heart of teaching: how do you offer more support to pupils, while taking work away from teachers?"

Bristow's lived experience of the burdens facing teachers—especially the relentless marking and feedback tasks—became the impetus for a new venture. He asked: What if the time-consuming administrative work in schools could be transformed by technology, freeing teachers to teach rather than mark?

Founding Vision & Role

Dominic now serves as CEO & Founder of stylus Education. His vision is clear: deploying AI to reduce teacher workload while maintaining—or even improving—the quality of feedback students receive. Stylus focuses on automating assessment marking and personalised feedback for paper-based school assessments, especially where digital infrastructure is limited.

Read Also: Reinventing Protection: The Journey of Peter Gilleece & Vikela

Building the Product: 𝐬𝐭𝐲𝐥𝐮𝐬 service

stylus developed a platform named 𝐬𝐭𝐲𝐥𝐮𝐬 service, which is designed to:

• Accept bulk-scanned paper-based student assessments.
• Use AI to mark and analyse work at scale.
• Combine automated marking with human moderation (teachers reviewing AI output) to ensure quality and credibility.
• Provide reports and actionable feedback to teachers and students—enabling personalised teaching and freeing up time that teachers otherwise spend on marking.
  

The platform targets a specific pain point: in many UK schools, teachers perform hundreds of hours of marking outside classroom hours, especially when dealing with traditional paper-based tests and major assessment blocks. Stylus seeks to "take the work out of the paperwork" and help schools save significant teacher time.

Early Days: From Idea to Traction

Bristow's journey started in his classroom and grew into a startup:

• He recognised early that teachers were leaving the profession or suffering burnout primarily due to workload. Stylus's marketing highlights statistics such as "40% of new teachers leave within five years and 92% of these citing high workload" in the UK.
• Having spent years in education, Bristow founded stylus in January 2025.
• In 2024, Stylus secured £500K (~US$656K) in seed funding led by Sure Valley Ventures (an AI-focused VC) to scale its infrastructure and prepare for full launch across schools.
• Early adoption: Stylus worked with multi-academy trusts (large school groups) across the UK as early users and began piloting its AI-marking solution ahead of broader rollout.
  

Challenges, Strategy & Scaling

Operating in a sector like education with tasks rooted in tradition (paper marking, teacher workload) means Stylus faced multiple hurdles:

• Credibility & trust: Teachers and school leaders are rightfully cautious of automation replacing the human touch. Stylus addresses this by combining AI with human moderation and emphasising that their tool supports teachers rather than replaces them.
• Technology adoption: Many assessments remain paper-based, especially in schools with limited digital infrastructure. Stylus designed for scanning paper assessments in bulk and processing them, making their solution compatible with the real world rather than requiring complete digital conversion.
• Workload reduction vs quality feedback: The challenge is not only to reduce teacher marking time but to maintain quality, personalisation, and report validity. Stylus's approach of AI + teacher review is their product strategy.
• Scaling under trusted conditions: Schools will adopt only if infrastructure is reliable, data privacy is assured, and real-world savings are demonstrable. Stylus's seed funding is aligned with scaling infrastructure and trials to validate the product.
  

Why the Story Matters

Dominic Bristow's journey is significant because:

• It begins with direct experience of a pain point (teacher workload) and translates into a tech product addressing it. Many successful founders start from their own experience and the problems they've lived through.
• stylus focuses on a problem often overlooked in EdTech: the administrative burden on teachers, rather than merely student learning alone. This flips the lens to adults (teachers) as primary beneficiaries.
• The founder's background as a teacher and someone who moved into edtech gives him domain credibility—something that matters strongly in education markets.
• The timing is right: AI, generative models, and computer vision are now capable of automating tasks previously impossible. Stylus stands to benefit from this technological inflection.
• The business model has potential scale: services that help save teacher time and retain staff can lead to quantifiable cost savings for schools. Stylus claims a saving of ~£17,000 per subject per year using their platform.
  

Vision & Next Steps

𝐬𝐭𝐲𝐥𝐮𝐬 are rewriting the rule book in the assessment and improvement of English writing. They've had a whirlwind first 18 months as a company, bringing rigour to the use of AI in schools: they won much-contested funding from the Department for Education (twice!), they were named BESA Startup of the Year 2025 and are now nominated for two BETT Awards for AI and Innovation, all in recognition of the support they offer their dozens of customer schools and groups through an English writing marking service of globally unprecedented detail and accuracy.

Helen Williams, CEO of InMAT, says “𝐬𝐭𝐲𝐥𝐮𝐬 works for teachers, headteacher and leaders… no gimmicks, no snake oil, it just works.”