Dolly helps teachers reclaim their work-life balance with Claude in Amazon Bedrock

Dolly helps UK teachers save time by using Claude in Amazon Bedrock to instantly grade assignments, generate research-backed lesson content, and create detailed student progress reports.

Key results with Claude

• 60-70% reduction in marking time for digital quizzes and assessments
• 8-10 hours saved per teacher per week across multiple classes
• Quiz marking reduced from 1.5-2 hours to instant feedback for a class of 30
• 50% reduction in report writing time with AI-generated narrative summaries

The teaching profession faces a workload crisis

UK teachers face a mounting crisis. According to the National Foundation for Education Research, workload pressures have pushed teacher supply to a critical state. Educators routinely carry home stacks of papers to grade, sacrificing their evenings and weekends to administrative tasks.

But volume is only part of the problem. "We discovered that teachers lack the time and proper tools to maintain quality records of student performance," said Owen Morgan, co-founder and CTO of Dolly. "Most rely on basic applications that pull generic comments from pre-written libraries, providing no real context or personalization."

Without meaningful student data, teachers miss crucial opportunities to intervene and support struggling learners. The repetitive administrative burden drives talented educators away from the profession entirely. Dolly's founding team, former teachers who left the classroom for software engineering roles because of these exact frustrations, experienced this firsthand.

The team recognized AI's transformative potential. Morgan explained, "With the right AI model, we could automate the time-consuming but necessary aspects of assessment. Teachers could get high-quality, personalized feedback for every student without grading on weekends. AI agents could research topics and generate engaging assignments. The technology existed to give teachers their lives back."

Choosing Claude for accuracy and educational alignment

Dolly needed an AI model that could handle educational content with absolute accuracy while understanding nuanced requirements. "Claude's large context window was crucial," explained Morgan. "It lets us include full essays, curriculum standards, and historical student performance in a single prompt without losing focus on the grading task."

Technical capabilities were only part of the equation. Claude's approach to feedback sealed the deal. "Claude consistently delivers the kind of clear, constructive feedback that teachers would write themselves," Morgan noted. "It's encouraging, academically appropriate, and focused on helping students improve."

The structured output capabilities were essential for their use case. Morgan said, "Claude's accuracy in generating structured outputs surpassed that of other models in our evaluations." This reliability meant teachers could trust the system to format feedback consistently and extract key information from student work without errors.

The platform also needed to handle handwritten work, common in most classrooms. Claude's vision capabilities were essential. "We use Claude's vision features to convert handwritten student work into digital text while preserving the original formatting, spelling errors, and grammar mistakes," said Morgan. "Teachers get accurate digital copies of physical assignments."

Amazon Bedrock provided the perfect deployment solution. Morgan explained, "Using Amazon Bedrock ensures we maintain control of data sovereignty and it fits into our existing deployment and monitoring processes." For schools handling sensitive student data, this level of control was non-negotiable.

How Claude powers efficient teaching workflows

Dolly built a custom Amazon Web Services (AWS) Step Functions workflow to manage multi-stage prompting with Claude. Morgan explained, "We break complex tasks into focused steps, each handled by a separate Claude prompt. This improves output quality and makes our system easier to maintain." The architecture leverages Amazon Bedrock for model inference while ensuring data sovereignty, a critical requirement for educational institutions.

The platform transforms how teachers work. Claude-powered agents research topics before generating assignments and provide sources for verification. Digital quizzes receive instant grading with detailed feedback for each student. Teachers can create differentiated materials for various ability levels in minutes instead of hours. The system maintains real-time student reports based on AI-analyzed performance data.

Morgan emphasized that teachers retain full control, saying, "Teachers always have the final say. They can edit any content or feedback before sharing it with students. Dolly acts as an assistant, not a replacement."

Teachers reclaim their time while students receive better support

The results have been transformative. Grading quizzes for a class of 30 students used to take 1.5 to 2 hours. Now it happens instantly with detailed feedback for each student. "What used to take hours now happens in seconds," Morgan shared. "And since quizzes are fundamental to checking understanding and strengthening recall, this is saving time and transforming how teachers track and support student progress."

Teachers describe a profound shift in their daily experience. Morgan said, "It's like having a teaching assistant who's always available, never gets tired, and can instantly adapt materials to match their students' needs." One teacher shared that it was the first time in years they'd left work without taking a stack of papers home to grade.

Students benefit from personalized feedback on every assignment, receiving individual attention that's often impossible in large classes. Parents appreciate the richer reports that go beyond simple grades to describe their child's strengths and areas for development. "Teachers are amazed by the depth of detail Dolly provides for each student," Morgan explained. "It lets them focus on actually teaching while still delivering better outcomes."

Building the future of AI-enhanced education

Dolly's ambitions extend beyond administrative efficiency. Morgan said, "Dolly is evolving into a trusted collaborator for teachers. Next, we're focusing on personalized learning at scale."

The team envisions Claude in Amazon Bedrock helping generate fully personalized assignments based on individual student ability, prior knowledge, and engagement patterns. They're developing support for inquiry-based learning, with AI scaffolding open-ended questions and practical tasks aligned with proven educational frameworks.

"Our goal is to help teachers do what only humans can do," Morgan explained. He sees teachers focusing on insight, creativity, and genuine care while Dolly handles repetitive tasks. "With Anthropic as our AI partner, we're reimagining what's possible in education, giving teachers the tools to achieve more with less stress."