Two years after joining the Teachmate community, Our Community Multi-Academy Trust (OCMAT) share how the platform has transformed everyday working life across their schools. From reducing workload and improving wellbeing to empowering staff to lead new interventions, it’s changing how teams across the trust work day to day.
You can watch a short video from Tom Marsh, Trust ICT Lead at Our Community Multi-Academy Trust, sharing his trust’s journey with Teachmate here.
Read on to hear directly from Our Community Multi-Academy Trust about their experience.
By Emma Rannard
At Our Community Multi Academy Trust (OCMAT), we’re always looking for ways to support our staff and make their work more manageable. Two years ago, we joined the Teachmate community, providing subscriptions for all our schools. Since then, the impact has been transformational, not just in our productivity, but for work-life balance and staff wellbeing.
Teachmate is used in a variety of ways in our schools, from creating word mats to support the development of vocabulary, to creating images to support the development of speech and language. It’s an incredibly useful and easy-to-use piece of technology that has enhanced many aspects of working life in our schools. Our staff save hours every week whilst ensuring the children still receive high-quality examples of work. Furthermore, Teachmate always provides a detailed breakdown of what it has created and the different domains that it links to within the primary curriculum.
Saving Time, Supporting Staff
In the last month alone, our staff have saved 4,393 hours using Teachmate. That’s thousands of hours spent more productively on teaching, planning and student engagement, rather than on repetitive admin tasks.
“One of my favourite tools is the ‘Draw My Character’ tool. It really helped to engage the children’s enthusiasm when writing their character descriptions of Wild, giving them a real sense of purpose for their writing. The images it generated were remarkably similar to the personalities of the children who created them!” – Joanna Apps, Class Teacher
Empowering Support Staff
Due to the versatility of Teachmate, support staff feel empowered to take the lead on various interventions. We’ve seen a wealth of great resources created to enable support staff to successfully deliver interventions. Many staff are now confident in creating specialist resources for the interventions they are running, such as speech and language, fizzy hands and precision teaching. The time saved and resources created really allow staff to have a sense of ownership over the subjects they are developing and leading.
“As a school office, Teachmate has become an incredibly valuable tool in our day-to-day communication. It’s especially helpful when creating newsletters or sending detailed information to parents about upcoming events, even when we don’t have all the details at hand. The platform helps fill in the gaps with clarity and professionalism, saving us time while ensuring our communication remains consistent and informative. It’s like having an extra set of hands (and a sharp mind) when things get busy!” – Steph Moir, Office Manager
Our Top Tools Making a Difference
Our staff are using a wide range of Teachmate tools, but our most popular last month were:
- Help Me Write
- Lesson Planner
- Model Text Generator
- WAGOLL Generator
- Comprehension Generator
Supporting Leadership Across the Trust
It’s not just classroom teachers who benefit. Senior leaders across OCMAT have found Teachmate invaluable for coordinating school improvement plans and sharing resources between schools.
“Teachmate has really helped me to complete so many admin tasks and save a great deal of time. I have used it to help with letters to parents, risk assessments, school development plan targets, as well as many of the planning tools for English. It was also really useful when writing comments for reports. I really like the quality of whatever Teachmate generates and the time that it has saved me over the year is an absolute gift!” – Kirsty Warner, Head of School
For our executive headteacher, Cath, Teachmate has also been incredibly helpful for creating high-quality student reports.
“Each year as an Executive Head, I have over 300 reports to write comments on at the end of the summer term. In July I used Teachmate to support my headteacher’s comments. The section created allowed me to support teacher comments and adjust the tone of the comments, whilst personalising them to the individual children. The comments that we created were as good as those I write and were not at all repetitive. It made a cumbersome job much easier to manage.” – Cath Hurst, Executive Headteacher
Teachmate: A Tool That Grows With Us
Being part of the Teachmate community for two years has shown us the power of AI in education when used responsibly. The platform saves time, supports creativity and helps staff across our trust focus on what matters most, which is providing excellent learning experiences for our pupils.
“Teachmate is more than just a tool for us – it’s a trusted colleague that helps our staff deliver their best every day.” – David Whitehead, CEO
As OCMAT continues to grow, we’re excited to explore new ways Teachmate can support our staff and our pupils. From lesson planning to strategic initiatives, it has become an integral part of how we as a trust, work smarter, not harder.
Thank you, Teachmate!