 I'm Ross McGill. People will know me as Teacher Talkit online. I'm a Deputy Headteacher. I've been teaching 23 years. Marking. It's the bane of teacher's life. It'll never go away. We'll always need to mark. It's with workload, recruitment, you know, the kind of reputation as teachers, as a profession. It's not an easy place to be. With the marking, with curriculum reform and examinations, marking's been made a bit tougher, a bit more rigorous. But as a school leader, you can come up with a marking policy that tries to reduce the workload and expectations of what to mark and what not to mark. But you're always in a constant battle with government reforms because you might say don't mark this, but when off-stead popping or the DFE reform various specifications, you're working against each other in many respects. So it takes a smart school, smart person, smart teacher to come up with something that works for the kids. So it's interesting times. I don't think we're quite there with a solution for anyone yet. And would you say that marking has become the tool that it's set out to originally do is not the tool that it is now? You want marking to help this child, full stop. The danger is you have school policies, book looks, learning walks, off-stead inspections that all come in and you have all these other people coming in to look at the teacher's book to see if you're doing one what's right or what's expected and then two, to try and work out in whatever book it is, even if it's a PE lesson or a drama lesson or an English teacher's book in that child's classroom that you're looking for the kid to have acted on that feedback. An example would be in some recent learning walks that we've done in our school, you might go and look at a particular subject and if you're doing it in isolation without the child or without the teacher to give you the back story, it's like observing a lesson. You're leaving the observer to make an assumption of what's happened. So I'll be saying that there's more to marking. It's holistic marking compared to just marking a book because if I came in and marked one of your books it would just be a thing of, okay, I can see some trill but I don't know the holistic part of that child. No, you don't. You never will because you're only going to get a snapshot of what happens, what's in the book is the evidence of what's taking place in the lesson or a bit of homework out of school. You might see a bit of dialogue between the teacher and the child where things go wrong and becomes a bit of triple marking or verbal feedback stamps where you start to produce records of evidence for a third party to look at, to almost guide them in to say, look here, I've done it, look at me and that's where marking's going wrong and added to increased workload on the individual teacher. And what would you say are some of the down pitfalls of marking? What are the problems you see with that? Well, two simple ones. Tick cross, tick cross all the way throughout the book. Obviously in maths it's pretty straightforward but if I'm marking an essay, the Battle of Waterloo and I'm doing a bit of spell checking, ticking cross throughout, there's not much there that's going to help improve the child's performance. So that's the first downfall. A second downfall would be I might speak to the child and say, oh the first paragraph of your essay is fantastic, do x, y, z. Put a verbal feedback stamp in the book to say that I've spoken to the child and it's just to prove to an observer that I've spoken to you to give you feedback. What's the point of wasting time doing the stamp? Okay. And would we say in terms of teachers role being, have we got OTT with marking? Yes and no. I'll go back to my main point. Marking is the bane of teachers life. You'll always have marking to do. You'll always have a parlor marking to take home at the weekend during your half term holidays as we're doing this film now, it's my half term. More and more obviously as a senior teacher I teach much less. I still have a great deal of marking to do. I try my hardest to keep my marking in school but if I was a full time teacher, which the vast majority of people are probably watching this are, you've got a 90% timetable, you've got 10% protected time for chasing up behaviour, making positive phone calls, going into all different bits of software recording, homeworks and different reward points and whatever else. That time to mark is miniscule and I've blogged about this many times. The answer to workload is simple. The government need to fund schools more to allow teachers the freedom to reduce the contact ratio from 90%. Live marking, so marking there and then in the lesson with the child so it would be dependent on what activities are going on in the lesson but aim for two or three children at your side by your desk mark and give an instant feedback and next lesson choose another two or three. You might want to target specific groups of students. You might want to target one or two students that have been absent so they can get back up to speed. I find live marking works really well. It reduces the marking that you need to do outside of the classroom in your own time. One that I've been using for the last year or so is the yellow box and for me it works twofold. One, it reduces the marking need and two, it makes it very obvious where the marking will take place so if you're not familiar with the yellow box you might have an essay. I might just highlight the middle section of your essay and I'm going to spell check that and I'm going to check the content, the facts, the foreign against arguments and ask the child to redraft that only. I've totally ignored the beginning and the end of the essay because I just want to focus on this as an area for development. I want to reduce my marking quantity and I want to focus the child on a specific area only so that I ensure that they act on that feedback. You can then add another empty yellow box and you can expand the size of the box depending on how much you want the child to act on that feedback. So there's a couple. A third one, get the kids to work for you. Try and design any activity in the lesson where you can involve the students doing some peer or self-assessment. That takes all the work away from you and if you can get some regular habits going on in the lesson that can significantly reduce your workload and again although I teach much less I have decreased my own marking because of one, the yellow box and two, I design a lot of the learning activities in my lesson where students will self and peer assess what they are doing so that it requires less input from me.