The Impossibly Gnarly Subject of Marking.

Marking can be a very touchy subject — for everyone. Parents often wish more could be done. Students often wish it would never be done (because that means they have to fix their work). And teachers? Well, we know how incredibly important it is to students, but the queue of things we have to do is as impressive as the pile on our in-tray.

Approaches That Ensure Success

Let me start by saying that good marking is incredibly important in ensuring progress. The Education Endowment Foundation looked at which approaches best ensure progress in terms of evidence and cost. Several things drive high levels of progress, and obviously, the ideal approach is one with strong evidence for success and low cost. There aren't many of those.

One, unsurprisingly, is parental involvement, which rates as highly as feedback (of which marking is a part). This, unfortunately, is largely out of our control — we either get parental involvement or we don't. When it's there, the benefit to children can be up to four months of progress. Interestingly, peer involvement rates just as highly at low cost. I've found this very effective with peer reading pairings, which can benefit a student by up to five months. But teacher feedback rates at 6+ months and is one of the most effective tools we have. So — how do we do it well?

The Forms Feedback Takes

Let's be clear: feedback doesn't have to mean marking in books. Feedback often happens within a lesson, where a teacher checks progress or steers students away from a wrong path. It can be a starter exercise where students discuss and conclude, and the teacher confirms the answer five minutes later. But feedback that is clear, detailed, and genuinely personalised will almost always take the form of marked student work.

Where Marking Can (and Did) Go Wrong

Let's start with the obvious: it is physically impossible to mark every single thing in a book. I'll explain why shortly. Pointing out everything that's wrong, or everything that must improve, has some value — but for a high-achieving student, this used to mean their book was left bereft of any comment, while a lower-ability student would be overwhelmed by the impossible task of fixing everything wrong, often without the support they clearly needed.

It's also essential that a teacher doesn't just spot what's wrong, but feeds back in a way that shows the student how to improve — not just what went wrong. "Tick and flick" has little value beyond showing the student that the teacher has turned the page. It can be useful in subjects with clear right and wrong answers, like maths or science, but even then, without a modelled method for success, what's the point?

The Elephant in the Room

There are big problems with the approach above — starting with the simple fact that you cannot mark everything. This really hit home for me during a teacher training session where we were asked to bring in books to mark and given two minutes per book. I began marking and quickly realised I was doing far too much, far too slowly.

On average, a class has around thirty children (though with so many schools trying to claw in every bit of funding, I know plenty of classes sitting at 33 or 34). Two minutes of marking per book means an hour or more to mark one class set. Depending on the lesson, there might be very little writing, or as many as three pages. Most schools have a policy of marking books within two weeks of the work being set — with four lessons a week, that can mean marking anywhere between six and twenty pages per student. Even a weekly mark would mean four to twelve pages.

As I marked and the timer ticked down, I got better at it. Following the school's policy, I stopped correcting every spelling error and focused only on subject-specific ones. Instead of commenting on everything, I gave one or two points for improvement, and ticked what didn't need comment. Sometimes I ran over, sometimes I finished early, but it taught me a valuable lesson: marking needs to be very specific about what actually gets marked. This matters enormously when you consider the gnarly, much-debated issue of teacher time.

How Teachers Spend Their Time

We have great holidays — I can't deny it. If we didn't, I suspect we'd lose half the workforce almost instantly. Retention is a massive problem right now, and as a teacher and a mother, I know I'm not alone in feeling that the holidays, and the chance to look after our own children, are what make this job viable at all. (A government report from June 2024 notes that the teaching workforce is 76% female.)

What I can't do is save up seven weeks of unmarked books and tackle them in the holidays. Holidays aren't a substitute for being given sufficient time during term to actually do the job.

For a full-time English teacher with no management points, you get a handful of free periods a week. Some are protected; others get swallowed up by cover. So often, a "free" isn't really free. Assuming most English teachers have five or more classes — representing around four lessons a week on average — marking even on a weekly basis takes, as that training proved, well over an hour per class. That should sound like a reasonable balance, right? Use your frees, add the rest on at the end of the day, and so on.

Unless. You factor in the hour-and-a-half of training each week. The parents' evenings — up to four hours long, five to seven times a year depending on whether you teach A Level. That's all extra. The twenty to twenty-eight hours spent on this are on top of everything else, and none of it is marking. I'd be tempted to do it before school, but that time is already spent planning four or five fully inclusive lessons. Then there are the termly assessments — at roughly ten minutes of marking per student, multiply that across a class, then across every class. And mock exams push the average marking time even higher.

This isn't meant to make you feel sorry for us, readers — we chose this profession! It's simply to highlight, for anyone who isn't "in the room," the real challenges involved in doing the work we know needs doing, as meaningfully and efficiently as we can.

Ensuring Progress

If marking doesn't lead to some kind of progress, it's not really worth the time or effort. Working to a department-agreed focus for particular pieces of work within a module may well be the best approach — perhaps saving real time and energy for two specific pieces of work per term, alongside the half-termly or termly assessment.

Many schools and teachers use the WWW/EBI method (What Went Well / Even Better If), sometimes framed as "two stars and a wish." You identify what went well, but also make space for one or two clear, actionable targets for improvement. This works well, as long as time is set aside afterwards for students to actually act on it. Done properly, it ensures students genuinely improve. Take a piece of creative writing, for example: one EBI might be to add a metaphor and a simile; another might be to consider where cyclical structuring could strengthen the story. Once applied, these small changes can have a real, measurable effect on the level a student's work is sitting at.

As a literacy teacher, I also can't — and shouldn't — correct every spelling error. Letting students improve without feeling overwhelmed is hugely important. As an English teacher, I might correct "adjective" or "metaphor"; a history teacher might correct "source" or "reliable." Subject-specific vocabulary is the key focus, and it's what teachers should be noting. Since students learn best by doing (good old Bloom again), I model the correct spelling and ask them to practise it.

So There You Have It

I hope this gives a little more insight into what marking really involves, and why it matters so much in helping students improve. Done properly, it can lift students' standards, understanding, and progress — not by a little, but by the equivalent of months of learning. Marking has been independently identified as high-impact and low-cost. It's well worth the government ensuring teachers are given enough time to do it well.