Noticed wins Let Teachers SHINE 2026
We're delighted to share that Noticed has been named a Let Teachers SHINE 2026 winner, receiving £25,000 from education charity SHINE to help more students recover learning lost to absence.
Let Teachers SHINE is an annual funding competition run by SHINE (Support and Help IN Education) that helps teachers launch, develop and grow innovative ideas for tackling educational disadvantage. This year's award recognises the work of Tara Markham — Head of Science and Educational Advisor at Noticed — and the platform we're building together.
The problem we're solving
When a student misses a lesson, the learning rarely gets recovered. As Tara put it in SHINE's announcement: “Around 60 million days of learning are lost every year, with no effective follow-up procedure for schools or students to bridge the gap.”
The impact isn't felt equally. “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,” Tara said. Students facing emotional, mental or physical health challenges, exclusion, or caring responsibilities miss the most lessons — and have the least support to catch up.
How Noticed helps
Noticed connects to a school's MIS to identify absent learners automatically, maps missed lessons to curriculum objectives, and generates concise keep-up worksheets so students can bridge the gap without teachers building resources from scratch. Teachers are alerted if work isn't completed, misconceptions are flagged, and positive effort is recognised — all without adding to workload.
The focus is deliberately “keep up” rather than “catch up”: staff can select foundational worksheets so returning students aren't overwhelmed. As Tara said, “I'm hoping it really alleviates that stress of how on earth am I going to catch up this insurmountable amount of knowledge?”
You can see how this works for yourself in the interactive demo on our homepage, which walks through a simulated school from absence to completed keep-up worksheet.
What the award means
On hearing the news, Tara said: “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.”
The £25,000 award will help us develop the platform and bring it to more schools — so that students who miss lessons get the support they need to keep up, and teachers get that time back.
Our thanks to SHINE for backing the idea, and to every teacher and school leader who has shaped Noticed so far. You can read the full announcement on SHINE's website.