The best AI writing feedback tools for UK primary schools (2026)

How this comparison was made

This page is written by the team behind Howay, so we have an obvious interest — and we would rather say so than pretend otherwise. Competitors are included on merit, every factual claim was checked against each vendor's own website in July 2026, and where we could not verify something we say “on request” or leave it out. Each section links to the source we checked. If we have got a detail wrong, tell us and we will fix it.

At a glance

Pricing and features checked on each vendor's own site, July 2026. Always confirm current terms before buying.

Howay — best for formative feedback on handwritten writing

Howay is built for the weekly reality of a primary classroom: thirty handwritten books after every extended write. A teacher photographs each piece, and Howay returns a child-friendly summary of strengths and next steps plus a criteria-level breakdown mapped to UK writing frameworks (KS1–KS2). It is deliberately feedback-led rather than grade-led — it surfaces the curriculum standards evident in the writing instead of producing a numeric score — and every output is editable by the teacher before it reaches a child or parent. Individual teachers can sign up directly with a free tier; the paid plan is £4.99/month billed annually (£6.99 monthly), with school and MAT pricing on request.

Honest limits: Howay is primary-only and a newer product than most others here, and it is not a whole-school standardisation tool — if you need moderated national benchmarking, look at No More Marking below. More detail on the workflow is on the teachers page.

WriteTrack — best for DfE-framework marking with published pricing

WriteTrack is a UK primary writing-assessment tool for Years 1–6, built explicitly around “the expectations, language and progression set out in the DfE Writing Framework (2025)”. It reads handwritten work photographed on a phone or tablet (its OCR is described as optimised for UK primary handwriting) as well as typed work, and returns feedback grounded in National Curriculum requirements. Its standout feature for school leaders is transparent pricing: £25/month (or £250/year) per teacher for up to 35 pupils, and annual school licences from £1,250 + VAT for a one-form-entry school up to £5,000 + VAT for four-form entry, published openly on its site. Honest limits: it is a young product, per-teacher pricing is at the higher end of the direct-to-teacher tools here, and school plans are annual-only. If your school wants everyone marking against the 2025 DfE framework with a predictable per-form-entry cost, WriteTrack is the most straightforwardly priced option in this list.

Olex.ai — best for multi-academy trusts across phases

Olex.ai is the scale option: a UK writing-assessment platform used, by its own count, across 120 trusts, spanning KS1 to KS4. At primary it is DfE Writing Framework aligned; at secondary it marks against GCSE mark schemes — so a MAT can run one tool across both phases. It reads handwritten or digital work (photo on any device, or bulk scanning), offers multilingual feedback for EAL learners, and claims teachers typically save 60–90 minutes a week on marking and feedback. It has a strong awards record, including Bett (2025, 2026), ERA (2025, 2026) and BESA (2025) wins in AI-in-education categories. Honest limits: pricing is not published, and the product is pitched at school and trust procurement rather than an individual teacher wanting to start this afternoon. If you are a MAT English lead standardising writing assessment across many schools, Olex should be on your shortlist.

No More Marking — best for whole-school standardisation

No More Marking is in a different category from the tools above, and it is important to say so: it is a standardised assessment platform, not a week-to-week formative feedback tool. Its method is AI-enhanced comparative judgement — teachers (and its Automark™ AI, which reads scanned handwritten scripts) compare pieces of writing rather than marking against a rubric, which produces reliable whole-school and national-scale measures of writing quality. Schools get personalised pupil reports with national grades and cohort-level progress tracking. It is well-established and widely respected for moderation and summative judgement. Honest limits: the workflow runs in assessment windows rather than alongside your Tuesday marking pile, and subscription pricing is not published (schools subscribe annually; introduction webinars are the entry point). Choose it to answer “where does our writing stand?”, not “what should this child do next?” — many schools sensibly run it alongside a formative tool.

TeachMate — best as a general AI toolkit, not a marking tool

TeachMate (formerly TeachMate AI — teachmateai.com now redirects to teachmate.com) is a broad AI assistant for teachers: 150+ teacher-developed tools covering planning, worksheet generation, report writing and more, used by over 400,000 educators by its own count, GDPR-compliant and aligned to the DfE's AI safety standards. It appears on lists like this because teachers already use it daily — but at the time of writing we could not find a dedicated workflow on its site for marking handwritten pupil writing against a curriculum framework, so it is not a direct answer to the marking pile. It has a free tier, with paid individual plans and reduced school pricing detailed on its site. If your school wants one general-purpose AI subscription covering many small jobs, TeachMate is a sensible pick; pair it with a dedicated writing-feedback tool if marking is the problem you are solving.

Quill — best free option, for typed sentence-level practice

Quill.org is a US non-profit offering genuinely free literacy activities — free forever, for teachers and pupils. Its tools focus on sentence-level skills: sentence combining, grammar practice, proofreading and evidence-based reading responses, all with instant feedback as pupils type. By its own figures, 12 million students have written 3 billion sentences on the platform. Honest limits for a UK primary school: activities align to US standards (Common Core and state equivalents) rather than the English National Curriculum, everything is typed on screen — there is no handwriting workflow — and it gives feedback on discrete exercises, not on a child's extended composition. It is not an AI marking tool, but as free deliberate practice for grammar and sentence construction it is excellent, and a reasonable complement to any of the tools above.

What about just using ChatGPT?

ChatGPT is free, capable and already in many teachers' workflows, so it deserves an honest entry. For drafting model texts, generating success criteria or rewording a comment, it is genuinely useful. As a marking tool for pupil work, the caveats matter: consumer chatbots were not designed for children's data, so photographing pupil work into one raises UK GDPR questions your school would have to resolve itself; there is no UK writing framework built in, so curriculum alignment depends entirely on your prompt; and there is no workflow for a class set of books — no pupil records, no consistent criteria across thirty pieces, no editable child-facing report. We wrote a fuller, fair-minded breakdown at ChatGPT for marking: should teachers use it?

How to choose: four questions that actually separate them

Frequently asked questions