The quickest way to reduce teacher workload is for leaders to stop asking for work that doesn’t help pupils learn. In most schools that starts with marking: the written comments, the coloured pens and the book scrutinies that eat teachers’ evenings. Give quick feedback in the lesson instead, plan more lightly, and monitor by talking to pupils. The time moves into planning better lessons and teaching them.
Much of what follows comes from Christian Lang, an assistant head at a primary school in a deprived part of south Bristol, which rewrote its marking policy in 2017. The school was already rated outstanding, and Ofsted had praised its marking. Teachers were still marking until 10 or 11 at night.
Why is staff workload reduction so hard?
Because the work that takes the most time often looks like it’s working. Christian’s school used “close the gap” marking: in-depth written comments at least three times a week in every subject, in green pen, with pupils writing back. Teachers were good at it. Christian says he loved it and was brilliant at it, which is partly why it was hard to give up.
Nothing was obviously broken, and that’s the trap. A system everyone knows feels safe, even when it costs people their evenings. Looking back, his biggest regret is that they didn’t change it sooner.
Is your marking meaningful, manageable and motivating?
Those three words come from the Department for Education’s 2016 report Eliminating unnecessary workload around marking, written by an independent review group. The report also says that the quantity of feedback shouldn’t be confused with its quality, and that there’s no one-size-fits-all approach.
When Christian’s leadership team held their policy up against the three words, it failed all of them. It was meaningful mainly to the adults. Pupils could repeat back what the comments said because they’d been trained to, not because they knew what to do next. It was being managed, but it wasn’t manageable. And pupils were “motivated” mostly in the sense of complaining when their book hadn’t had a comment.
The Education Endowment Foundation’s review of written marking found a big gap between the time schools put into it and the evidence that it helps. That came as a surprise to a team who’d assumed someone, somewhere, had proved it worked.
So try the test on your own policy. Who is the marking really for? How many hours a week does it take? What changes for a pupil as a result?
Mistakes and misconceptions need different responses
Telling the two apart is what cuts marking time. A mistake is something the pupil can do and has done before; they just slipped. A misconception is something they haven’t understood yet.
Mistakes can be dealt with quickly, using a marking code the class has been taught. Instead of writing “punctuate the first sentence”, the teacher writes P in the margin. Misconceptions shouldn’t be dealt with in writing at all. If 15 pupils have the same misunderstanding, writing the same comment 15 times is the least useful thing a teacher can do. Change tomorrow’s lesson instead.
The rules Christian’s school settled on were short:
- every piece of work gets a response, and a tick or a stamp is enough
- every piece of work is reviewed, not just ticked and stacked
- a V in the margin shows verbal feedback was given
- progress is the test of whatever system a teacher chooses
One Year 6 teacher started sorting books into piles as he marked, then wrote the next day’s groups on sticky notes. Every morning the class was regrouped for a few minutes of targeted teaching. No forms, just sticky notes. Christian shows more of what the books look like now in the workload course.
How to manage teacher workload in planning
Marking wasn’t the only thing to go. The school had set lesson plan formats that named pupil premium pupils, attainment groups, what each adult was doing, key questions, and annotations after the lesson. Teachers were writing a plan and then building slides from it.
They dropped the separate lesson plan. If the slides make the learning intentions clear to a partner teacher and the other adults in the room, that’s the plan. Medium-term and long-term planning stayed. Many teachers kept a simple traffic-light table of who had met each objective and who needed more support.
New staff are sometimes thrown by being asked for the objectives for the next six days rather than full plans for six weeks. But lessons change once you see what pupils can actually do, so detailed weekly plans go out of date fast.
How can leaders monitor without adding to workload?
Stop carrying books away. Christian’s leadership team used to remove piles of books to another room and judge them. Now they sit in the classroom and ask pupils to show them their learning. Pupils give very honest answers, and the younger they are, the more honest they get. (It also means nobody’s book disappears halfway through a lesson.)
Leaders talk to teachers too. How’s this run of lessons going? What did you change? What worked? Drop-ins were arranged in advance at first, with a conversation beforehand so there were no surprises. Over time they became normal, and the follow-up became coaching rather than judgement.
What goes wrong when you change it?
Some things will, and it helps to expect them.
Staff may not welcome it as much as you’d think. Christian went into the first staff meeting expecting relief. He found a lot of uncertainty, because the old system felt safe. The meeting got emotional when people talked about the time they’d spent marking instead of being with their own families. Some teachers held on to detailed marking for most of the year.
A few people will treat it as permission to stop following up. If there are no follow-up tasks and no progress in the books, pupils are being let down, and that needs picking up.
The governing body will want to know what you’re up to, so bring governors in early. Set review points (Christian’s school reviewed at Christmas, after starting in November) and expect a messy first term. They briefly had 14 different feedback systems running, which turned out to be useful, because teachers shared what worked and adapted it.
And be honest with staff about what “reducing workload” means. Christian is clear that teachers didn’t necessarily get hours back. The time moved from writing comments to preparing better tasks and talking to pupils in lessons, and the work became less stressful. Many teachers now speak to every child in a lesson. Christian says the green pen budget fell by at least 80%, which pleased the school business manager.
Is there a workload planning template?
Marking is only one part of it. Workload also piles up around the calendar, when data drops, reports, parents’ evenings and mock exams land in the same few weeks. Our free workload planning template is a month-by-month table for mapping key events, peak workload and planned downtime across the school year, with a worked example. More leadership reading is on our leadership topic page.
Workload: How to Reduce Staff Workload Whilst Improving Student Outcomes is Christian Lang’s account of how his school replaced close-the-gap marking with feedback in the lesson, changed its planning and monitoring, and brought reluctant staff along. He’s open about the mistakes, and there’s a Q&A on coaching the teachers who wanted to keep the old system. It’s for heads, senior leaders and anyone who writes or monitors a marking and feedback policy.