Marking, Marked to UK English
Every assignment you set is judged to UK conventions from the first one, without you changing a setting. Spelling is checked against British English, your board’s specifications are in the standards list, and the marks come back with the reasoning and the pupil’s own words behind them.
50 submissions a month on the free plan, any assignment type.
UK English Is the Default, Not an Option
Every teacher in this country has adopted an American product and spent a term fighting its spellcheck. This is not that. GradingPal reads your country when you sign up and sets the language of student work to English (UK) on every assignment from then on — not a preference buried three screens down, and not something you re-select each time you set homework. Change it per assignment if you teach something else; otherwise it is simply right. That is which English it’s marked in.
“Colour” Is Not a Spelling Mistake
Turn the grammar check on and it reads the writing against the standard you are actually teaching. Colour, realise, centre and practise are correct; the American forms are flagged, which is usually the more useful direction in a Year 11 essay. Every finding is underlined in the pupil’s own work with the fix a tap away, you can dismiss anything you disagree with, and none of it moves the mark — if mechanics count in your marking, that lives in your rubric where it always has. That is spelling checked to the right standard.
Your Board Is in the List
Pick the specifications your department teaches to — AQA, Edexcel, OCR, WJEC, or Cambridge International if you are teaching overseas — and tag what you mark against them. Marks you approve build into a picture of where a class sits, with the actual piece of work one click from every point in it, against your board’s specification. Which is the thing that makes the conversation before a mock exam a different conversation — see exam marking, in full.
Your Department’s Marking Policy, Written Down Once
Every department has a marking policy and most of it lives in people’s heads: whether spelling counts on this task, how much credit working shown earns, what a Grade 6 answer looks like against a Grade 5. Write yours in plain words, share the rubric across the faculty, and set the rules to apply to every assignment you create. Everyone still exercises their own judgement — how your department marks just stops being four different readings of the same policy.
What We Don’t Do Here
We do not connect to your MIS. Work comes in through Google Classroom, by upload, or scanned from paper, and marks go back the way you send them — there is no sync with SIMS, Arbor or Bromcom, and we are not going to imply otherwise. We do not moderate or standardise anything; that is your department’s process and it stays with your department. And we do not detect AI-written work, in this country or any other.
We comply with UK GDPR, with your school as the data controller and GradingPal as the processor. The rest — processing terms, where data is stored, who else touches it — is set out in full on where the data sits, rather than summarised here.
Everything You Set
- Essays and extended writing
- Marked criterion by criterion, with the pupil’s own sentence quoted as the reason. essays and extended writing.
- Mock exams and past papers
- Marked to your board’s criteria, with the mark defensible in November. exam marking, in full.
- Handwritten work and exam scripts
- A whole class scanned as one PDF and split back into a submission each. scanned exam scripts.
- Practicals and calculations
- Working, units and significant figures. practicals and calculations.
- Speaking assessments and presentations
- Recorded work marked with comments on the moment. speaking assessments.
Try It on One Set You’ve Already Marked
Take a set you marked last half term and run it through. Look at the spellings it flags and the ones it does not. That is a two-minute test of whether this was built for the classroom you are actually in.
Frequently Asked Questions
Does it mark in UK English?
Yes, by default. It reads your country when you sign up and sets English (UK) as the language of student work on every assignment, so spelling and conventions are judged the way you teach them without you selecting anything.
Will it flag British spellings as errors?
No — the opposite. With the grammar check on, colour, realise and centre are correct and the American forms are flagged. You can dismiss any finding you disagree with, and none of them change the mark.
Can I mark against AQA, Edexcel, OCR or WJEC specifications?
Yes. Pick the specifications your department teaches to, tag what you mark against them, and every mark you approve builds a picture of where the class sits — with the actual work one click from any point in it.
Does it connect to SIMS, Arbor or Bromcom?
No. Work comes in through Google Classroom, by upload, or scanned from paper, and you send marks back the way you choose. There is no MIS sync and we would rather say so than let you find out later.
Is GradingPal GDPR compliant?
Yes — we comply with UK GDPR. Your school remains the data controller and GradingPal acts as the processor, and our processing terms, storage locations and sub-processors are documented in full on our security page.
Is it used in British schools?
Yes, across primary and secondary. What is worth knowing before you start is that the UK behaviour is built in rather than configured — the English standard, the spelling conventions and the exam boards are all there from your first assignment.
Marked the Way You Mark
UK English from the first assignment, your board’s specifications in the list, and every mark backed by the pupil’s own words.