And we’re up! Finally, a tool that sits at the intersection of educator burnout and AI frustration. Not here to take your job, but to hand it back with the heart of it still intact.
We have educators entering the profession because they care about learning, young people, ideas and the moments when a student finally gets it. Yet so much of their time can disappear into the administrative work surrounding those things. And we mean marking, assessment and feedback.
At Apollo, we believe technology can help change that.
And not by replacing educators, not by removing human judgement from assessment, and certainly not by reducing a student’s work to a number generated by a machine.
Apollo gives educators back time for themselves and their profession, while keeping them at the centre of the assessment process.
“AI should give time back, not take agency away.”
We’ve all experienced conversations around AI in education and know how quickly they become polarised. Will AI replace teachers? Will students stop thinking? Can we trust a machine to assess learning?
We think there is a better question: What work can AI take off an educator’s plate so that educators have more time for the work only they can do?
Sal Khan, founder and CEO of Khan Academy, has described the supposed choice between great teachers and great technology as a “false choice”. His preferred future is the combination of “amazing teacher and amazing technology.”
That distinction is central to Apollo.
While AI can process information quickly and identify patterns and surface potential areas for attention, education is not simply information processing. An educator understands context and they know their students. They recognise effort, growth, nuance and circumstances that may never appear in a piece of written work.
That human understanding belongs with the educator.
The Australian Framework for Generative AI in Schools provides a useful foundation for thinking about responsible AI in education. Its six principles include Teaching and Learning, Human and Social Wellbeing, Transparency, Fairness, Accountability, and Privacy, Security and Safety. The Framework was reviewed in 2024 and endorsed by Australian Education Ministers in June 2025.
For Apollo, one principle is particularly important: Accountability.
AI should support educational decisions, but it should not quietly become the decision-maker. That is why we see Apollo as part of an educator-led assessment process.
The technology can help with the time-consuming first stages of reviewing student work. The educator remains responsible for the final judgement: considering the work against the learning objectives, applying professional expertise and deciding what the student has actually demonstrated.
“In other words, Apollo helps with the workload. The educator owns the judgement.”
UNESCO’s guidance on generative AI in education argues for a human-centred approach that protects human agency and calls for ethical, safe, equitable and meaningful use of the technology. Its AI Competency Framework for Teachers likewise places human-centred thinking and ethics alongside technical AI skills and pedagogy.
That matters because efficiency should never become the sole measure of progress in education. If technology saves an educator an hour, the question shouldn’t simply be, “How much more work can we fit into that hour?”
It can instead be: Can they leave school on time? Can they have dinner with their family? Can they spend that hour planning a better lesson? Can they give extra attention to a student who needs it? Can they simply have some time back?
Teacher workload is already a recognised national issue. The Australian Government’s Workload Reduction Fund is supporting pilots specifically designed to reduce teacher workloads, including a current NSW pilot exploring generative AI for assessment, marking and feedback so teachers can spend more time on core teaching tasks.
The opportunity is evidently quite real. But so is the responsibility to get it right.
At Apollo, we aren’t interested in making educators less involved in assessment, we’re interested in making their involvement more meaningful. We want to take some of the repetition out of marking so educators can put more of their energy into interpretation, feedback, relationships and teaching.
And so we have it: the goal of education isn’t to produce perfectly efficient marking systems. It’s to help students learn. And the person best placed to understand whether that learning has happened is still the educator sitting on the other side of the desk.
And perhaps, in the process, we can give teachers something education has been asking for a long time:
A little more time to be human.