A Stockport science teacher has won a prestigious national competition.

Tara Markham, who teaches at Stockport Academy, was among eight outstanding teachers who won at the Let Teachers SHINE awards, which aim to reward teachers who develop ideas to help disadvantaged young people.

Tara won for her automated AI platform that helps absent students catch up on lessons they have missed.

She was given £25,000 in winnings to go towards developing her new platform, which is called Noticed.

Tara explained that she developed the platform to redress the rise in school absences across the UK.

"Around 60 million days of learning are lost every year, with no effective follow-up procedure for schools or students to bridge the gap", she said.

"This is essentially the problem that Noticed aims to fix."

By linking directly with school and curriculum information, Noticed will be able to identify absent students, generate bespoke worksheets for them based on what they missed, and notify the students via a portal with what they need to complete.

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Through the Noticed platform, Teachers can easily find the resources for learners to use either when they return to class, or to monitor and support students during periods of long-term absence.

Noticed flags student misconceptions to the teacher and also flags their 'best efforts'. This recognition and monitoring by the teacher will help the student feel seen and included, and to know that their progress is valued.

Through its data analytics, Noticed also gives teachers insight into lesson-level attendance, which can sometimes differ from a student's overall school attendance.

By uncovering this hidden lost learning, Tara aims to identify gaps in knowledge early and enable timely intervention before they widen.

She believes this approach will be especially beneficial for disadvantaged learners, who statistically experience higher absence rates.

"We know that attendance affects attainment, and we also know that our disadvantaged students have higher absence rates and lower attainment than their non-disadvantaged peers," explained Tara.

By bridging the gap between attendance and attainment, Tara hopes to ensure that students who miss lessons – whether due to emotional, mental or physical health needs, exclusion, or caring responsibilities – can effectively stay on track with their learning.

Designed to align with the latest Ofsted framework, Noticed focuses on 'keep up' rather than 'catch up' materials. As Tara explained: "The platform will know what should have been taught in that lesson and then it essentially generates a keep up worksheet for students to complete."

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The project also aims to reduce anxiety felt by children who are long-term sick or suspended. Staff will be able to select just the specific, foundational worksheets to ensure core concepts are learned and leave the rest, so the pupil is not overwhelmed by a large volume of missed work.

Returning to the classroom after an absence can be an isolating emotional experience. When the rest of the class has moved forward, the absent student often feels left behind. Noticed aims to address this by providing the student with support through high-value, manageable tasks they can use to keep up and on track.

As Tara explained: "I'm hoping it really alleviates that stress of how on earth am I going to catch up this insurmountable amount of knowledge?"

If a student finds the content too difficult, the worksheet becomes a resource for the teacher or teaching assistant to provide further guidance, while for more confident learners the tasks ensure they have a good grasp of core concepts to progress confidently to the next lesson.

Also intended to support busy teachers, Noticed will automatically notify staff if a student does not complete the work. It then supplies a print-ready resource that can be used in the next lesson or kept in the student's workbook.

"With so many things happening in the classroom at once, teachers often can't sufficiently catch absent students up. Noticed aims to reduce that stress, ensuring students have the tasks they need to keep up, without additional workload for the teacher," said Tara.

On winning the award, Tara commented, "I was just so, so excited. And so honoured, to be honest.

"When you do something like this, it's really nice for someone else to tell you that they think it's a good idea and to believe in you."

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