When Marking Becomes Bureaucracy Disguised as Professionalism

When did marking become a performance of professionalism?

There’s a strange cultural script many of us have absorbed in schools.

Teachers demonstrate commitment by how much they mark. Hours spent marking become a proxy for professionalism. Deep written comments are treated as evidence of care.

But what if this is the wrong measure of the wrong thing?

The uncomfortable truth is this: marking is often bureaucracy disguised as professionalism. It consumes time, signals compliance, and doesn’t automatically improve learning.

The EEF is clear: written feedback must be purposeful and time-efficient

The Education Endowment Foundation’s Teacher Feedback to Improve Pupil Learning guidance report is unusually blunt on this point. Written feedback is not free. It comes with a heavy workload cost and its impact is highly variable.

Recommendation 4 doesn’t celebrate long comments or frequent marking. Instead, it asks teachers and school leaders to carefully consider how to use purposeful, time-efficient written feedback. The emphasis is deliberate: if written feedback is not clearly moving learning forward, and if it takes more time than it is worth, we should rethink it.

In other words, the question is not, “How often do you mark?” but, “When you do, what difference does it make to future learning?”

We treat marking as if more time = more impact

The EEF’s summary of the evidence is sobering: written feedback can improve attainment, but the effects vary widely. The method — written or verbal — matters less than whether feedback follows the core principles: high-quality instruction first, feedback that moves learning forward, and clear opportunities for pupils to use it.

In practice, though, school cultures often reward the visible method over the invisible impact. Policies still specify how often books should be marked, which pen colours to use, or how many comments should appear. These things are easy to check in a book look. They are much harder to link directly to learning.

This is how marking slips from a professional tool into a performance. The question quietly becomes, “Can I show that I’ve been marking?” instead of, “Can my students show that they’ve used my feedback?”

Marking feels professional because it signals effort, not impact

It’s not hard to see why this happens. Marking is visible. It’s easy to count. It takes obvious effort. When a teacher is staying up late to finish a pile of books, nobody doubts their dedication.

The EEF reminds us to think in terms of opportunity cost. Every hour spent on one type of feedback is an hour not spent on something else: planning clearer explanations, rehearsing examples, designing better questions, or simply arriving in the lesson as a rested human being.

Once you frame it this way, the question of professionalism changes. Is it more professional to produce another page of written comments that students may skim, or to use that same hour to prepare a feedback lesson where every student actually acts on guidance?

Marking is not the villain. But automatic marking is.

None of this means written marking is inherently bad. There are moments when written comments, carefully chosen and tightly focused, are exactly the right tool. The problem is not marking itself — it is automatic marking: the idea that more written feedback, more frequently, is always better.

Automatic marking turns a professional judgement into a compliance habit. It’s the lesson observation where the question is, “Where’s the marking?” rather than, “How do these students understand their next step?”

A more professional stance asks a different set of questions:

• What learning gap am I trying to close here?
• Is written feedback the best way to close it, or would verbal, whole-class, or peer approaches work better?
• How will students use this feedback in the next lesson?
• What am I giving up in order to spend this time marking?

So what does professionalism look like instead?

If we take the EEF guidance seriously, professionalism in feedback has less to do with how much we write and more to do with how precisely we act.

Professionalism sounds like:

• Planning tasks that make pupil thinking visible so feedback has something solid to latch onto.
• Choosing feedback methods — written, verbal, whole-class — that match the task and the learner.
• Leaving space in lessons for pupils to respond, redraft, correct, and practise based on feedback.
• Protecting enough planning time that feedback is part of a coherent sequence, not a last-minute patch.

The shift we need: from paperwork to learning

For years, teachers have worn heavy marking loads as a kind of quiet badge of honour. Long evenings at the kitchen table have stood in for proof that we care.

The research invites us to rewrite that story. Caring about students does not mean maximising the number of comments in their exercise books. It means maximising the likelihood that each student knows what to do next — and has the time and support to do it.

Professionalism is not the number of hours spent marking. It’s the number of hours spent improving learning.

If written marking helps you do that in a purposeful, time-efficient way, keep it. If it doesn’t, the evidence gives you permission — and a gentle push — to change course.