In This Webinar

• TeacherMatic Awards 2026
• The Manchester College case study
• New and upcoming TeacherMatic generators
• Platform updates and future developments
• An introduction to the SAFE Framework
  
  

Celebrating Excellence Across the TeacherMatic Community

One of the highlights of every Summer Community Webinar is the annual TeacherMatic Awards. These awards recognise educators and organisations who are using TeacherMatic in innovative, impactful and thoughtful ways to support teaching, learning and assessment.

More importantly, they celebrate the willingness to share ideas, support colleagues and help shape the wider TeacherMatic community.

Individual Award Winners

• Bronze Award: Joey Blackwell, Novus, HMP Stafford
• Silver Award: Thomas Hewitt, Nottingham College
• Gold Award: Kathy McCabe, Northern Regional College
  
  

Organisational Award Winners

• Bronze Award: The Manchester College
• Silver Award: Stanmore College
• Gold Award: Barnet & Southgate College
  
  

Congratulations to all of this year’s winners. The quality of nominations once again demonstrated the creativity, dedication and professionalism that exists throughout the TeacherMatic community.

What makes these awards particularly meaningful is that they are not simply recognising technology adoption. They celebrate educators and institutions that are using AI thoughtfully and responsibly to enhance teaching, support learners and reduce workload while maintaining high standards of educational practice.

Learning from The Manchester College: Three Years of AI Adoption

One of the most engaging sessions of the webinar came from Rajesh Mistry, Quality Manager at The Manchester College, who shared the organisation’s three-year journey with TeacherMatic and AI.

As part of the LTE Group, which includes The Manchester College, UCEN Manchester, MOL, Novus and Total People, the college operates at significant scale. This means that governance, consistency and staff support are critical considerations whenever new technologies are introduced.

Starting Small and Learning Fast

The Manchester College began its TeacherMatic journey in 2022 with a small pilot focused primarily on classroom activity generators and practical teaching use cases. As both TeacherMatic and AI evolved, the organisation recognised the need to better understand how staff were using these tools and conducted a college-wide survey involving more than 300 teaching staff.

The findings from this survey helped shape the college’s wider AI strategy, informing future decisions around governance, staff development and implementation.

Building a Culture of Support

Rather than relying solely on technology, The Manchester College invested heavily in people, processes and support structures.

Over time, the college established:

• An AI Working Group
• An AI and Digital Innovation Lead role
• The AI Teaching Alliance and AI Pioneers programme
• Structured CPD and coaching opportunities
• The Digital Hub, a central repository of guidance, resources and support materials
  
  

The AI Pioneers programme has been particularly successful. Teachers act as champions within their departments, sharing examples of effective practice, testing new tools and supporting colleagues. The initiative helps keep AI visible while ensuring implementation remains grounded in real classroom needs.

What They Have Learned

Rajesh concluded with a series of practical lessons that will resonate with many institutions currently exploring AI adoption.

• Governance matters.
• Staff need digital confidence before they gain AI confidence.
• Regular training and support are essential.
• Teachers want examples that are relevant to their own subjects and workloads.
• Managers need training too.
• Analytics and feedback are invaluable when measuring impact and identifying successful practice.
  
  

The presentation was a powerful reminder that successful AI adoption is not about technology alone. It requires leadership, support, governance and a commitment to continuous learning.

What’s New in TeacherMatic

The webinar also provided an opportunity to showcase several new developments across the platform.

Curriculum-Connected Lesson Planning

The enhanced Lesson Plan Generator now allows educators to upload an existing Scheme of Work or Curriculum Plan and generate lesson plans based on a selected session or week.

This helps ensure that AI-generated lesson plans remain aligned to curriculum intent rather than producing generic content.

Enhancing Feedback and Assessment

Several developments were showcased to support feedback and assessment workflows, including updates to the Advanced Feedback Generator, new Grading Rigour settings, Refine functionality, the Comparative Assessment Generator and continued development of the BTEC Feedback Generator.

Particularly noteworthy was the Comparative Assessment Generator, which enables educators to analyse multiple submissions simultaneously, identify cohort-wide trends and uncover opportunities for targeted reteaching.

Rather than focusing solely on individual learner performance, it helps educators identify patterns across an entire group, supporting more responsive teaching and curriculum planning.

Supporting Recruitment and Enrolment

The new Course Suitability Generator and Course Suitability Feedback Generator are designed to support evidence-informed admissions and enrolment discussions.

These tools help identify the characteristics associated with success on a programme while providing structured insight that can support professional judgement and learner guidance.

Supporting SEND Practice

The webinar also introduced two new beta tools:

• Educational Support Plan Adviser
• Educational Support Plan Summariser
  
  

These tools are designed to help staff review support plans more efficiently, identify key teaching implications and reduce the administrative burden associated with lengthy documentation.

Platform Updates and Future Developments

Technology Director Oli Stearn also shared several platform developments and roadmap updates.

Highlights included:

• New AI model implementations
• Web search functionality within selected workflows
• Canvas integration
• Improvements to feedback workflows
• Additional administrative controls
• Ongoing interface modernisation
• Enhanced export and formatting options
  
  

As always, many of these developments have been influenced directly by feedback from the TeacherMatic community.

Introducing the SAFE Framework

The final presentation introduced the SAFE Framework, a practical, pedagogy-first model designed to help institutions implement AI-supported feedback responsibly.

SAFE is built around four core principles:

• Safeguarding data and privacy
• Augmenting professional judgement
• Fairness and inclusion
• Ethical and transparent practice
  
  

Rather than focusing solely on technology, SAFE encourages institutions to think carefully about governance, implementation, quality assurance and the role of human oversight in AI-supported feedback.

Explore SAFE in More Detail

During the Community Webinar, SAFE was introduced at a high level. If you would like to explore the framework in greater depth, we recently delivered a dedicated Deep Dive Wednesday webinar and published a comprehensive blog exploring the framework and its practical implications for schools, colleges and universities.

Read the SAFE Framework blog and watch the dedicated webinar replay

• SAFE Framework
• SAFE Feedback Guidance

SAFE is intended to be a living framework that evolves through sector feedback, emerging evidence and ongoing collaboration with educators, colleges and universities.

Looking Ahead

While the Summer Community Webinar showcased exciting new developments across the platform, perhaps the strongest message was the continued strength of the TeacherMatic community itself.

The ideas shared by institutions such as The Manchester College, the achievements recognised through the awards and the conversations taking place throughout the webinar all demonstrate the value of bringing educators together to learn from one another.

Every new feature, framework and improvement discussed during the event has been influenced by feedback from the community. That partnership with educators remains at the heart of everything we do.

Thank you to everyone who attended, presented, asked questions and contributed to the discussion.

We look forward to seeing you at the next TeacherMatic Community Webinar.