Is it normal for teachers not to mark exercise books?

[Milomonster]

DS is at a prep. He has some learning support issues eg handwriting. I checked one of his exercise books which hasn’t been marked by his teacher for months. One of his homework tasks had mistakes and hadn’t been corrected. Is this normal practice?

If you're a maths teacher, why don't you just move to a different school with a better marking policy? Most have moved away from that kind of expectation. Or just threaten to move. I'd get organised on this, canvas the teachers on their opinion. Show them the evidence on what feedback in effective. Find out what other local schools are doing, their policies are often on their website. Start discussions in the staff room about it, talk to your union reps if appropriate. If enough teachers voiced their displeasure, and make noises about leaving to work in schools where the marking policy is good, especially if they're maths teachers, I'd wager the policy could be changed.

Covid thing here -- they stopped physically marking most things; online marking is much less detail than physical marking would get.

That's a good idea @ejhhhhh, except I generally like the other policies in school. The school I'm at currently has the best behaviour locally, and we're mostly left to our own devices about how to teach our lessons with nothing massively prescriptive other than the marking policy. There's only one other school in the area that I would want to work in, and they, like us, never have any vacancies because people don't leave unless they're retiring. I'm willing to compromise on the marking for the other benefits of my current school.

Marking every single thing in an English book would be impossible for a teacher. They probably teacher over 200 kids from 9-3 five days a week and to go through the books on top would easily take their working day to at least twelve hours.

At to that, kids are completely turned off by a sea of red pen correction. Better to focus on one or two key things at a time and work on that. Eg. 'Their, there, they're' or capitalisation.

I think even in the best schools, SLT will be a bit nervous about not having enough Maths teachers. Particularly at the moment when recruitment is likely to be squeezed. If anyone watched Laura McInerney's talk at this summer's festival of Education, she made a very good point about maths teachers. A maths graduate no longer needs to work in London for the big bucks in the roles that usually recruit maths graduates in London (finance, data science etc). They can work from their living room anywhere. That is very bad news for schools! They need to meet you half way to keep you. Or you could threaten to work for a bank from home!

@hocusspocuss

Marking every single thing in an English book would be impossible for a teacher. They probably teacher over 200 kids from 9-3 five days a week and to go through the books on top would easily take their working day to at least twelve hours.

At to that, kids are completely turned off by a sea of red pen correction. Better to focus on one or two key things at a time and work on that. Eg. 'Their, there, they're' or capitalisation.

RED PEN Not allowed We use pink for corrections ( pink think) Green to highlight positives ( green great )

A lot of schools do something called whole class feedback. We don’t do ‘marking’ as you may expect, but will plan our lessons based on notes we make (and keep a record of). Current research suggests this is far more useful and productive for both staff and student.

We also do a lot of self marking with clear criteria (which we check when we take books in).

There’d also possibly be a lot of verbal and in class feedback. Things your child may not realise is directly their teacher assessing them.