Every student deserves a teacher’s full attention.

How it started

A pile of scripts, and a Sunday that was already gone.

Ask a teacher when they mark and the answer is almost never during the school day. It is after dinner, after their own children are in bed, on a Sunday that was supposed to belong to them. We kept hearing the same sentence in different words: I am not behind on my marking, I am behind on my teaching.

Naming the one thing that is breaking a piece of writing, and showing a student how to fix it, takes about ten unhurried minutes to do well. A whole class of those is a full working day, and it has to come out of your own evenings and weekends. So the comments get shorter, vaguer and later, until they are a number and five words in red.

That is the quiet trade every teacher makes: which students get your best, and which get “good effort, watch your tenses.”

It is not a failing of effort. It is arithmetic. A whole class, marked properly, does not fit inside a week, so the depth that helps students most is the first thing to go.

What we kept coming back to

Knowing what went wrong is not the same as learning to do it right.

Every teacher has a student who has been told to watch their tenses for two years. The comment was right every time. What never arrived was the lesson built for that one child, because writing it, and then a different one for the next child, and another for the next, does not fit inside anyone’s week.

Personalised learning already exists. It costs a few hundred dollars a month, and we call it tuition.

That is the part we find hard to accept. A child whose family can pay gets work chosen for them. Every other child gets the class average and is expected to keep up with it.

What we are building

A classroom where every student gets what they need next.

Zippy reads every piece against your rubric and drafts the specific, kind, skill-by-skill feedback you would write yourself if you had the hours, then hands it to you to approve.

The same reading builds a record of what each student can and cannot do yet, and the practice that follows is written from that record, for that student. You check it, you assign it, and their next piece tells you whether it worked.

It does not replace the teacher. It gives every teacher the time to be one, and it puts the thing only some families could ever buy within reach of every child in the room.

Not faster marking, but personalised learning for every student. Not just the ones who can afford it.

We build in Singapore, with ex-MOE educators, against the standards our students are actually marked against. Teachers in other systems use Zippy too, and the rule is the same wherever it goes: your rubric, your standard, your approval.