About
Built for UK teachers, by someone who kept hearing the same complaint
Marking is the part of teaching that eats evenings and weekends. It is also the part that is hardest to hand over, because a grade is a professional judgement and a mark scheme is not a checklist. GradeOrbit exists to take the mechanical half of that job — reading the script, transcribing the handwriting, finding the evidence against each criterion — and leave the judgement where it belongs.
Who runs GradeOrbit
GradeOrbit is operated by George Burgess (sole trader, trading as GradeOrbit), registered with the UK Information Commissioner's Office under ZC132530. George is the founder and writes the leadership and school-rollout guidance on the blog.
Classroom-facing guides — subject marking, AI detection, exam-board specifics — are written by Breanna Mitchell, Content Writer. Every article carries the name of the person who wrote it; there is no house byline.
What we believe about AI in marking
A suggestion is not a decision. GradeOrbit never finalises a grade on its own. It reads work against the mark scheme you supply, proposes a mark with the evidence attached, and waits for you to approve, change, or reject it.
Your mark scheme, not a generic rubric. Marks come from the criteria you upload, aligned to AQA, Edexcel, OCR, Eduqas and WJEC across KS3, GCSE, A-Level, BTEC and Functional Skills. Maths is graded gate by gate, so correct working still earns method marks when the final answer is wrong.
AI detection is an indicator, never proof. Writing changes as a pupil learns. Our detection compares a piece against that pupil's own earlier work and flags a marked change — a reason to have a conversation, not evidence of wrongdoing.
No training on your work. Work is processed by Google's Gemini models under a zero-retention agreement and is never used to train any AI model.
How data is handled depends on the account
These three postures are genuinely different by design. We do not describe one using the other's language.
- Individual and team accounts
- Uploaded student work is never saved to our database. You can black out names and personal details before processing, and pupils are labelled “Student 1”, “Student 2” — we never try to detect a real name.
- School accounts
- The deliberate inverse: work is retained under a signed Data Processing Agreement, so staff can return to a marked script and the school gets analytics. Retention is windowed and wiped when it expires or when a school leaves.
- Student accounts
- A learner's own work is saved to their own account so they can track progress across drafts, and is deleted with the account whenever they choose. A GradeOrbit mark is a study estimate — never an official or certifying grade.
Full detail lives in the Privacy Policy and the Transparency Pack, which is generated from the same source of truth the product uses.
Questions, or want to talk about your school?
We answer procurement and data-protection questions directly — no sales call required.