DeepMark was founded by a teacher and a software engineer who both grew up around education. What brought them together wasn’t an opportunity, it was a crisis.
Over 114,000 teachers left the profession in just three years, according to the latest Department for Education figures. One in three don’t make five years in the classroom. Right now, one in three of those still teaching say they are considering leaving in the next twelve months. Nine out of ten of those named workload as the reason.
This is not a recruitment problem that better marketing will fix. It is not a resilience problem that another wellbeing initiative will solve. It is a structural problem, and at the center of it is the weight of work that follows teachers home. Teachers don’t need more wellness initiatives, they need less work.
Marking is the single most time-consuming non-teaching task in the profession. It is also the one most resistant to the kind of support schools can realistically provide.
Geoff lived the marking workload. Stuart grew up watching his family live it. They reconnected, and DeepMark followed.
Geoff Waugh
Co-founder · CEO
Geoff has worked in education for over 12 years, first as a university lecturer and now as a GCSE Business Studies teacher. As a single father, he watched weekends and family time consumed by marking and administrative workload. He didn't experience teacher burnout as an abstract policy problem. He lived it.
There's no shortage of wellbeing initiatives in schools in the UK. What's actually missing is time. Give teachers that time back, and everything else gets better.
13 yrs in educationGCSE BusinessFormer lecturer
Stuart Bourhill
Co-founder · CTO
Stuart is a senior software engineer with over a decade of experience building products and systems in fast-moving technology companies. Coming from a family of teachers, he understood the human side of the problem immediately and recognised that artificial intelligence had advanced far beyond what schools could realistically access.
The technology now exists to give teachers their time back. What was missing was a product built for the realities of a classroom with safeguarding, transparency, and teacher control at its core.
10+ yrs engineeringProduct & systemsFamily of teachers
When the two of us reconnected, the conversation was straightforward: the technology finally existed to make a real difference. The more teachers we spoke to, the more it was impossible to ignore that teachers did not need more wellness programs, they need less work. Artificial intelligence was getting to the point where it could vastly improve teachers lives by accelerating the marking process.
But the tools available today were inconsistent, unsafe for sensitive student data, and completely disconnected from the realities of schools. Existing products were built by people who understood software. What was missing was something built by people who understand classrooms.
We realised there is something else artificial intelligence makes possible that no individual teacher ever could with a red pen, deep data driven insights. A view across an entire cohort. Where a class is consistently misunderstanding a concept. Which question types are producing the most errors. What feedback patterns correlate with better scores over time. Not just less work for teachers, but better data for schools and better outcomes for students.
When the two of us reconnected, the conversation was simple: the technology now exists to give teachers their time back. What’s missing is a product built for the realities of a classroom.
What was missing was a product built around the realities of teaching, one that kept professional judgement, accountability, and student data safeguarding at its core rather than bolting them on as an afterthought.
DeepMark is our answer.
What we believe
Fourthingswe won't move on.
01
Professional judgement stays with teachers.
Every mark is provisional until a teacher confirms it. DeepMark is a first reader, not the decision-maker. Accountability stays where it belongs.
02
Safeguarding is non-negotiable.
Student data is never used to train external models. We were built for school environments on day one, not adapted for them after the fact.
03
Full transparency on every mark.
Every suggested mark links to the exact passage that earned it. No black boxes. Teachers can see, and override, the reasoning at any point.
04
Built around real classroom workflows.
Not a generic AI tool adapted for schools. DeepMark was designed from the ground up around how marking actually works in a UK department.
