Why does the NEU say that teachers should not be expected to mark work during the pandemic?

[Thenagainmaybenot]

The national education union says that:
'Worksheets and textbook pages for maths and English can work if they are already used in school and all children have them at home. However, teachers cannot be expected to mark work. Schools should not be setting SATs tests or mocks at this time.'

Why shouldn't teachers be expected to mark work? Fair enough they shouldn't be marking as much as they do normally, but (say) 1-2 maths and english tasks per week to be marked is surely reasonable?

Maybe I have misunderstood what work teachers would be expected to do if they were 'marking'. I think MrsHerculePoirot's suggestion is excellent - I would be happy for the teacher to set spellings, get parents to mark them, and then send in a copy of the marked work. The teacher could then give feedback.

Dont forget as well that the unions just provide guidance to members. At times on MN there seems to be a belief that they somehow control schools and government.

Unions have always been easy scapegoats, but without them there would be a lot less teachers at the moment and we're already dreadfully short staffed in many subjects.

A lot of teachers will be providing feedback and many heads will also be demanding it of their staff having taken the time to find suitable methods.

The first is what I think all teachers should be encouraged to do, and I can't find the NEU saying that

The union cannot tell teachers what is best practice to do, they give advice on, for instance, workload. The comment you refer to is a pedagogical method and not part of their remit. They are there to protect the conditions of service of their members, not give educational advice.

If you notice, they were not involved in the design of SATS of the National Curriculum.

Museumum glad it is not just me! My children's school seem to have interpreted 'no marking' as 'no feedback to be given by teachers'. In fact 'no work to be sent in and if it is no feedback to be given' is more the case.

And yes, I have raised this with the school. And it can't be just me, because things are changing, slowly.

“ If it has said 'teachers should not be expected to mark work but [insert appropriate level of workload here] feedback should be given in the following ways' that would be fine”

But the advice is for those that work in schools and understand the difference between marking and feedback. It’s not aimed at parents. Different subjects, difference teachers and different schools and students can feedback in different ways that work best in each scenario.

We use a website that marks students work as they do it. I look through and give each student individual feedback and encouragement and they can ask me for help when stuck but I’m not ‘marking’ in general.

PP said they didn’t have time to work out complicated maths to mark it - I meant that the school will provide the answers for students or parents to check not you’d have to work them out yourself 🙄

But lots of the other points on the link I posted do make suggestions on what to do (and what not to do). For example (I paraphrase) 'Live Zoom has risks, pre-recorded is better'. So why not 'no formal marking, feedback can be given in a variety of ways'?

OK, so what a lot of people are saying, I think, is that when the NEU says 'no marking', teachers will understand it as 'no marking, give feedback'. What I am saying is (from my experience) that has NOT been the universal experience, and sadly, no feedback has been given.

I am hypothesising that it may be because the 'no marking' has been interpreted (possibly wrongly) as 'no feedback'.

Live Zoom has risks, pre-recorded is better
This is not advice on pedagogy, it’s about safeguarding.

feedback can be given in a variety of ways
This would be teaching Grandma to suck eggs.

On iPads you can write on photos, so some work could be marked that way

I'm a teacher without an ipad. Few teachers have tech provided by school, most of your kids lessons will be from the teachers personal device.

The sad reality as well is that (despite those little ads they make) teaching is a job.

You get good chefs and poor ones. Good plumbers and poor ones. Good doctors and even poor ones. Good supermarket workers and poor ones....

We all want the best for our children so I understand the anger on these forums from some, but the reality is teachers are not really any different to other professions....you get good ones and poor ones.

Without making it sound trivial I get cross when I go out to a restaurant and get poor service. So I naturally complain. Some of you are getting a poor service so naturally complain. However, I wouldn't extrapolate my poor dinner to suggest all waiting staff are rubbish, which is sometimes the feeling on here regarding teachers.

Let's not forget most primary teachers are back in full time now.

Because teachers KNOW how to give feedback. They are just protecting teachers from being expected to somehow ‘mark’ every piece of work set.

If you have an issue with the feedback you are getting from your child’s teacher then you need to contact them and speak to them about it.

This advice from them isn’t to tell us what or how to do our jobs it is to protect us from unreasonably demand as best they can.

I think a balance is needed. All lessons set (we’re setting their normal timetable, so 6 lessons a day) should have work submitted (otherwise why would students be incentivised to do it) and should be responded to (why would anyone keep submitting work if there was zero acknowledgement of it?!).. however.. if all my students actually started submitting all their lessons, I’d be ‘marking / feeding back on’ (whatever way you want to swing it - looking at what they’ve done and returning something constructive to them) to over 150 students on timetable heavy days. I’d like to think that this is what the NEU was trying to prevent happening.

(Never mind the time it takes to respond to students queries about their work, or a specific part of it; engagement data drops; well-being phone calls; training for whatever new piece of software we’re using this week; that you’re on site today supervising KW pupils, or working with year 10 or 12; writing SoW for next year; dept. or wider school meetings; choosing a star of the week for each class, with justification, and e-mailing that to the correct house (which takes less time if you’re accurately tracking all your pupils- but keeping that mega spreadsheet updated daily takes time!); emails; planning the lessons!! (in a format which has everything they need on there as I’m not there with them to explain in a different way, and in a format that can also be accessed from mobiles because they don’t all have their own laptop).

I KNOW not all teachers are doing even the basics of setting lessons on the right days and responding to kids work - shared classes anyone? But some of us are working our asses off, far more than we would be expected to do in normal circumstances (which quite frankly is shocking anyway.. there’s good reason why there’s a recruitment and retention crisis!)

Aah, that feels slightly better. To anyone who thinks I’m exaggerating the above, these are all things that are happening daily, weekly or (eg SoW) since lockdown started. Don’t get me started on live lessons...

I am marking all work submitted electronically. It was recommended that we don't but in my secondary we do. They have also fine written assessments based on their learning. To be fair it doesn't take long to mark seeing as so many kids aren't actually doing it!

My primary kids had nothing marked and not really any acknowledgment. My 6 year old still desperate for her reading certificates!

We've marked everything that's been submitted, which sadly hasn't been a lot.

Most of my colleagues are not in agreement with the NEU stance on most issues. We were glad of some support and guidance while everyone found their feet at the beginning but are not finding them helpful now. Most teachers I know are far more willing than the NEU are leading the public to believe.

I've marked every single piece of work that's been submitted (and sometimes twice, where students have responded to feedback and improved their work).

Spent around 20 minutes per piece of work to start with (and minimum 10 minutes more recently as I've had to reduce it during second half of closures as other workload). This is with 20-30% of students in my classes submitting work on a weekly basis. If they all submitted for me, that would be much more than the ten hour days I'm working as it is.

@Thenagainmaybenot I have not marked a single book since the start of lockdown. I have not collected one book or one worksheet to mark.

However I have marked everything that students have upload as assignments to Teams. So that is at least one piece of assessed work per week per student. Plus I have just marked the end of year exams for year 10 and year 12. Again it is all online. Wonderful thing technology.

@Thenagainmaybenot ' not sure what you are getting at ' am hypothesising that it may be because the 'no marking' has been interpreted (possibly wrongly) as 'no feedback'

The days of tick and flick are long gone. Assessment for learning is what we do now.

Sorry to here your school isn't doing this. Never mind normal service will be resumed soon.

It's a conspiracy, the government are secretly working with teachers to ensure that future generations become more stupidificated.

Teachers also really enjoy winding parents up, so even though marking work is actually a two second job that can be done whilst making a cup of tea, they would prefer to make you believe that they are PFBs that don't want to catch COVID-19, and your children's spelling mistakes could literally kill them.

STAY AT HOME -> DON'T LEARN BOOKFACTS -> SAVE THE BHS

DS in year 3 had to submit all his work over lockdown on a platform- photo uploaded- and his teacher commented on every single piece of work. She told him any mistakes in the comments.
He’s back at school now thankfully.

The variation has been a problem. My niece and nephew have had full timetable teaching with live lessons (private) but within the state sector, the gulf seems enormous. I know people whose children have had full teaching and those who have had no personal communication at all. I don’t think there is any excuse for some teachers in some schools to have not communicated at all with their pupils. Mine hasn’t even started school yet but she’s had zoom calls with her reception teachers, interaction and tasks set on tapestry.

The NEU guidance has been updated several times since then OP. That was right at the beginning, just after school closure when we were dealing with an emergency. It would have been ridiculous in that situation for schools - and I know some Heads who would absolutely do this - to hold teachers to their usual marking policies.

Since then the NEU has issued more practical guidance about how to safely get everyone back to school than any of the bazillion govt documents.

Remember- the government suspended the curriculum- that’s still the case. Any teacher/school delivering anything is going way beyond what the totally shambolic government response has outlined.

Tell me, OP, how exactly you would go about marking a photo when your school marking policy requires any number of different coloured pens and highlighters to provide targeted feedback?

Any work on paper should be picked up from the school after being quarantined for 72 hours. Electronic formats should be encouraged'

So you expect parents and teens to be making utterly unnecessary journeys to school with work which has to be sorted and separated in some way, which the teacher picks up, takes home, marks, returns to school and parents and teachers go back to school to pick up the work?

Aside from unnecessary journeys, what about the potential number of contacts there between people which are also totally unnecessary? I get people are frustrated but you haven’t really thought this through, OP.

If the union had meant "don't mark work, but proactively give feedback", then that's what they would have written.

The fact is they didn't, and I don't think it was unreasonable of the OP to state infer a "can't do" attitude by the union