The School Mathematics Project (SMP) began as an educational movement at the University of Southampton in the 1960s, producing a well-known series of mathematics textbooks that evolved with curriculum change into the early 2000s. In 2023, an HEIF-funded project (SMP Online) translated a subset of the archive into interactive, STACK-based online textbooks, covering selected A-level topics — vectors, sequences and series, trigonometry, regression, and correlation. STACK is an open-source, computer-algebra-backed question type for Moodle, giving real-time feedback based on the actual mathematical content of a student’s answer rather than string-matching. The project ran across five local schools with more than 400 students, and demonstrated that this kind of feedback could work at classroom scale.

In 2026, SMP 3.0 is now extending this work with a new authoring method. Rather than being written by hand, STACK questions are now produced by a supervised team of AI agents (running Claude) — a Planner, Author, Reviewer, and Enricher — with every item checked by a human before it goes live. Two AQA A-level books are now complete: Core 1 and Core 2, each with a full set of interactive questions, worked examples, and diagnostic feedback across every chapter.

Work continues on the remaining four books in the six-book AQA sequence, alongside a GCSE Foundation course. Planned next steps include a single-school research case study in the 2026/27 academic year, using real student response data to further refine the automated marking, and a larger, multi-school efficacy study, with a target bid to the EEF 16-19 Innovation Fund in 2027.

We’re also exploring a portable, lower-cost version of the approach for low-resource settings, with partners including IDEMS, INNODEMS, and KMS. A technical write-up for the STACK community blog (stack-assessment.org) is in preparation alongisde a more research-focused publication for the Proceedings of the BSRLM 2026 Summer Conference. Watch this space!

If you are a researcher, a school teacher, a prospective PhD student, or an otherwise interested party in collaborating on this work, please reach out to me via email!