Some schools have banned the red pen. The argument goes that red is an angry colour, tied up with mistakes and telling-off, and that a page covered in it knocks a pupil’s confidence. So out came the green pens, or purple, as something gentler.
There’s a case for red, though. It stands out against blue or black writing, so pupils can see exactly where the corrections are. And if everyone switches to green, green soon becomes the new red. Children aren’t daft. They know what the ink means, whatever colour it is.
Some would say that’s fine. Correcting mistakes is the point of marking, and seeing them clearly might spur a pupil on. Others think a page of red crosses mostly tells a child what they can’t do.
Maybe the colour isn’t the problem
Would a pupil feel any better about thirty corrections in purple? Probably not. The more useful question is how much we mark, and what the marking is for.
That’s had a lot of rethinking since this debate first did the rounds. The Education Endowment Foundation’s review of the evidence, A Marked Improvement?, found surprisingly little good evidence behind many everyday marking habits. The Department for Education’s workload review group warned against marking that takes a lot of teachers’ time for little benefit to pupils. And Ofsted has said it doesn’t expect to see any particular type, frequency or amount of marking.
Plenty of schools have since moved away from detailed written marking of every piece of work, towards whole-class feedback and marking live in the lesson, with quick verbal feedback too. Picking out a few important errors, and asking the pupil to put them right, tends to do more than correcting everything.
So what should we do?
None of this means ignoring mistakes to protect pupils’ feelings. They need to know what they got wrong and how to fix it. But feedback they can act on matters far more than the colour of the ink it’s written in.
If you’d like to look at your school’s approach to feedback, Making Effective and Productive Use of Assessment is a good place to start.