The Ink We Don't Need: Redrawing a Department's Marking Boundaries

A marking policy rarely collapses. It erodes. A comment added here, a tick-and-flick expectation there, a parent complaint that leads to a new line in the handbook — and within three years a department is marking more than it ever agreed to, for reasons nobody can quite trace. By the time the workload becomes unsustainable, the practice has acquired the status of tradition rather than policy.

The useful question for a subject team is not whether to mark, but which markings earn their place. Answering it properly requires something more disciplined than a grumble in a meeting: an audit, a distinction, and a written agreement that survives contact with a busy term.

Start with the evidence already in the cupboard

Most departments already hold the data they need. It is sitting in exercise books.

A workable audit takes one department meeting and a representative sample — perhaps twenty to thirty books across two year groups and the full attainment range, drawn openly and with the agreement of the staff whose classes are involved. The sample is not a monitoring exercise and should not be presented as one. Books are anonymised in discussion; no teacher is named; no judgement is recorded. The purpose is to trace the life of a comment.

For each marked piece, three questions are enough. What did the teacher intend when writing this? What did the pupil do next? What changed in the following piece of work? In many audits, the honest tally is sobering: a substantial proportion of comments are never responded to, either because no time was built in for a response or because the comment arrived after the class had moved on.

Alongside this, estimate the cost. Ask each colleague to note, for one week, the time spent marking a single class set. Multiply sensibly. The figure is rarely trivial, and it makes the subsequent conversation about priorities concrete rather than rhetorical.

Three piles, not two

Debates about marking tend to stall because they are framed as rigour versus workload. That framing is a trap. A more useful distinction separates three things that are routinely bundled together.

First, feedback that moves learning: a comment, question or model that prompts a pupil to think again, revise, or apply a correction in a later piece of work. Second, feedback that records compliance: ticks, highlighting, dated stamps and generic praise, which demonstrate that a book was opened but rarely change what a pupil can do. Third, feedback that is really assessment information — valuable, but often better captured centrally than written thirty times in the margins.

Only the first category requires a teacher's pen. The second can usually be retired without loss. The third can be converted into a whole-class feedback sheet, a question-level analysis or a short quiz, which serves planning better and costs less.

This is the logic behind the Department for Education's workload reduction work and the Education Endowment Foundation's guidance on feedback, both of which point in the same direction: feedback should be purposeful, and its form should follow its purpose rather than a uniform template applied to every page.

A written agreement a department can hold itself to

Once the audit is done, the agreement itself should be short enough to be read in a meeting and specific enough to be enforced. One side of A4 is usually sufficient, and six clauses cover most of the ground.

Purpose. One sentence stating what written feedback is for in this subject. In English it may be extended writing and technical accuracy; in mathematics, method and reasoning; in design technology, the quality of a practical outcome. Vague purpose produces vague marking.

What we will always do. A minimum, not a maximum. For example: one substantial piece of written feedback per unit of work; live marking during independent practice in every lesson; whole-class feedback following each summative assessment. Minimums protect pupils; maximums protect nobody.

What we will no longer do. This clause matters most and is usually omitted. It might include: commenting on every page; requiring a written response to every comment; re-marking a pupil's response to a comment; writing feedback on work that will never be revisited.

Time to act. A comment a pupil cannot respond to is a comment wasted. Departments that make this work build a short, regular reflection slot into lessons, sometimes colour-coded, sometimes simply the first ten minutes after feedback is returned.

What we will do instead. Name the alternatives explicitly — whole-class feedback, a model answer with annotations, a targeted group conversation while the rest of the class works. Alternatives that are unnamed tend to be forgotten.

How we will know it is working. Not by counting comments. By looking at whether pupils' work improves across a sequence, whether pupils can explain what they are getting better at, and whether the feedback is being acted upon in lessons.

Making progress visible without a marking trail

Leaders sometimes worry that a leaner policy leaves nothing to show. In practice, it leaves better evidence.

A department that can produce a sequence of work showing a pupil's writing developing over six weeks, a question-level analysis from a recent assessment, and pupils who can articulate what they did next after feedback is in a stronger position than one that can produce thirty identically annotated pages. Inspection guidance is clear that inspectors do not expect to see a particular frequency or style of marking; scrutiny is of the quality of education, not the density of ink.

Where senior leaders ask how the department knows feedback is happening, the answer is the agreement itself, accompanied by three or four sources: book reviews conducted as professional discussion rather than audit, pupil voice from a short conversation with six pupils, lesson visits focused specifically on the response to feedback, and assessment outcomes over time.

Holding the line in the first term

The agreement will be tested. A new member of staff will arrive with habits from another school. A parent will ask why a piece of work has only a single comment. A governor will query how the school evidences marking.

Three things help. First, write the agreement with the whole team, including early career teachers, so that it belongs to the department rather than being issued to it. Second, agree a review date before the trial begins — a half-term is usually right — so that objections are treated as evidence rather than resistance. Third, share the agreement with the senior leadership team and with governors in plain terms, explaining what has been removed and why, and what has replaced it.

Marking is one of the few professional activities that expands to fill whatever time is available. A department that names its boundaries, in writing and with reasons, does not lower its expectations. It simply stops paying for work that was never doing anything for the pupils it was meant to serve.