Teachers spend nine hours a week marking – despite lack of evidence that it works

Teachers spend nine hours marking every week but there is still little evidence to show which strategies have the most positive effect on pupil progress.

This is according to a new research paper published by the Education Endowment Foundation (EEF).
The report, entitled A Marked Improvement, raises concerns about the “significant disparity” between the enormous effort that teachers invest in marking and the research that is available to evidence and justify which approaches are the most effective.

The discussion is important because marking was found to be the single biggest contributor to teachers’ unsustainable workload in the government’s Workload Challenge in 2014.

That survey, which involved 44,000 teachers, found that in primary schools, classroom teachers spent an average of 9.7 hours a week assessing and marking pupils’ work, while in secondary schools, teachers spent 9.4 hours a week on marking. In academy schools the figure was 8.7 hours.