is this normal/acceptable marking

[Shirleycantbe]

My DD has just started Year 3 and brought her English book home this evening to do her homework. I noticed that no piece of work she has done since 13th Sept has been marked - including at least 2 pieces of homework. Is this normal or would you expect a teacher to mark work over a month period?

we have to mark every night!

Every piece of work every day. It informs the next steps for planning and informs the child what they did well and what their next steps in their learning are.

Thanks for the replies - are you teachers?

Yes

I'm a teacher too although now am a sahm. Definitely should be marked very frequently - and some of that marking should include detailed comments about how the work has met the learning objectives and how it might be improved. You'd also expect that your child would then have the opportunity to improve their work based on the comments.

In our school, books are never returned to a child with unmarked work.

Well, perhaps if they were half way through a piece, but hardly ever.

We have to mark every piece every day. It's not too bad for me (Year 1) as they don't write too much at this time of the year. I don't know how teachers in the Upper Juniors cope with 90 books to mark every day, with at least some of them being marked in depth.

Most schools I've worked in have been it needs to be marked once a week. There are occasions when daily just isn't possible.

However working in supply at the moment and having worked in a number of schools previously I wouldn't say it was unusual for work not to be marked. Some of the classes I've worked with have seemed to have hardly anything marked so far and I know in the past my colleages couldn't get everything marked everyday not matter how hard they tried. Although in the majority of the books I've seen so far it's just been the last few days unmarked at most.

I always aimed to mark everything everyday (it has huge advantages), however I found it impossible and it's one of the reasons I no longer work as a regular teacher. It wasn't unusual to have 3 or 4 nights of staff meetings going on from 3.30pm until after 6pm each night. On top of that you have the planning (often in ridiculously complicated formats), resourcing, running clubs and other paperwork issues that senior management are insisting on as a higher priority than the books.

It took me nearly two hours to just mark the morning's work according to the marking policy (highlighted in 2 different colours and comments written in a third colour) at a school I was at last week. Considering the class teacher was teaching a further two lessons in the afternoon, I dread to think how long she normally spent marking each week and how she got anything else done.