By Dan Fitzpatrick — Forbes contributor, three-time bestselling author, founder of The AI Educator, and advisor to schools, MATs and government bodies across the UK, US and internationally. Published 14 July 2026.
English teachers carry the heaviest marking load in the building, and everybody knows it. Thirty essays is not thirty ticks. It's thirty arguments to follow, thirty attempts at analysis to weigh, thirty voices to respond to as if you had all evening. You don't.
So the question isn't whether AI can help. It's which bits of the job you hand over. My rule hasn't changed: outsource the doing, not the thinking. The doing is the retyping, the reformatting, the spelling-and-punctuation sweep, the differentiated version of the same source. The thinking is the judgement on whether a student has actually understood Macbeth. Keep that.
How This List Was Built
I test tools in real classrooms, with real English departments, and I take feedback from the educators who use them daily. Every tool named here is reviewed independently in the AI Educator Tools directory, which now runs to over 114 vetted tools. I don't take payment for inclusion, and I say when something isn't good enough.
Adapting Texts: Diffit
If you teach mixed-attainment English, Diffit is the one I'd start with. Feed it an article, a PDF, a YouTube clip or a URL and it rewrites the material at multiple reading levels in over 70 languages, with comprehension questions attached. It does one job, and it does it properly.
Marking and Feedback: Brisk Teaching
Brisk Teaching lives in your browser and works straight inside Google Docs, which is where most student writing already sits. It'll give targeted feedback, show you a student's writing process, and draft comments you then edit. Editing beats writing from scratch every time.
Writing Support and the Integrity Question
Grammarly, QuillBot and the rest all sit in the writing, feedback and academic integrity category, and they're where the awkward conversations happen. Be honest with your classes about the line between support and substitution. Then teach to it.
The All-Rounder: MagicSchool
For departments that want one platform rather than six, MagicSchool covers 80+ teacher tools — rubrics, exemplars, model paragraphs, parent emails. You can see how it compares against everything else in the full directory.
How to Actually Choose
Gallup and the Walton Family Foundation found that teachers using AI weekly claw back roughly 5.9 hours — about six weeks over a school year. That only happens if you pick one tool and use it properly. Pick the task that eats the most time and needs the least professional judgement. Start there. Add nothing else for a month.
The Bottom Line
AI is very good at the mechanical half of English marking and still fairly poor at the half that matters — nuance, voice, a genuinely original reading. Use it for the first half. Guard the second.
Your Sundays will thank you.
Dan Fitzpatrick is Forbes' AI in education contributor, a three-time bestselling author, and founder of The AI Educator. He has trained over 150,000 educators worldwide and advises schools, multi-academy trusts and governments on AI strategy. Last updated: 14 July 2026.
