Workload: How to Reduce Staff Workload Whilst Improving Student Outcomes

If your teachers are marking until 11pm in green pen so a book scrutiny can find it, that time could go into feedback that moves pupils on. Hold your marking policy up against three words, meaningful, manageable and motivating, and you may find it falls short.

You'll learn to tell a mistake from a misconception and deal with each differently: a quick marking code for one, a changed lesson the next day for the other. A tick or a stamp covers most work. Leaders check progress by sitting with pupils and asking them to talk through their books, instead of carrying piles away.

The approach was worked out by an assistant head at a primary school in a deprived part of Bristol. You'll know what to expect from staff who cling to the old system, and from the few who treat it as a licence to stop following up.