Teachers who don’t mark homework are setting children up to fail

Just last week, as my daughter handed me her freshly marked test at the school gates, I’d joked about red ticks and crosses with the other parents. How on earth had these traumatic symbols of success and failure survived in our new, “love hearts all round”, “we’re all winners” culture? Everyone laughed, but there was a nervousness in the laughter.

Sure enough, on Sunday morning, there it was: the headline we knew was coming. “Half of teachers don’t mark pupils’ books.” Of course, they don’t. And there’s no need to ask why, is there? The primary reason behind this new trend – uncovered by the teacher survey app, Teacher Tapp – is all too predictable: “Concerns about upsetting pupils who are struggling in the classroom.” The secondary reason too. Because according to the report there’s another factor: “Fear that correcting work is too much of a burden on teachers.” And is it just me or is it always a bit of a red flag when a key part of someone’s job description becomes too onerous to bear?

In any case, statistics confirm that this trend is gathering momentum, with many British primaries said to be adopting “no marking” policies without consulting parents. Already only 42 per cent of more than 6,250 teachers who responded to the survey on the app were expected to mark either pupils’ exercise books or homework (down from 61 per cent in a similar survey in 2018). For secondary schools alone, the drop was sharper still – from 71 per cent to 41 per cent.

That’s less than half of these pupils’ getting their work marked. Less than half of the children having their precise errors pointed out and corrected, their misunderstandings clarified, their triumphs recognised and rewarded and their general progress monitored. What could possibly go wrong?

At Ivy Learning Trust – which runs 10 infant and junior schools in north London and Hertfordshire – adults are not allowed to write in children’s books. Trust leader Matthew Kleiner-Mann adopted a no-marking policy after seeing a teacher leaving school with a suitcase full of books to mark. “Teacher feedback is vital to children’s learning,” he insists, “not written marking.”

There are clear logistical problems with this approach. For starters, when do you find the time to talk to every single child in private about his or her work? And how likely are they to take an accurate mental note of your points? Certainly there will be nothing physical to refer back to, should they need to. No clear barometer of progress.

Far more importantly, the no-marking approach ignores that one surprising fact every parent becomes aware of early on: children actively like rules. They like yes and no, good and bad, ticks and crosses; boundaries, limitations, structure. It makes them feel seen and it makes them feels protected.

Is the “self-checking” system now being introduced by many schools – who ask pupils either to mark their own work or each other’s – likely to do that? Never mind that it makes education sound like one of those self-service supermarket checkouts I refuse to use (“Would you like a basic level of numeracy with that?”). If you were “struggling”, what could be worse than exposing those struggles to a potentially jeering classmate?