The Five Hours a Week That Decide Whether Weekly Practice Happens
Here is the trap every IGCSE teacher knows and few say out loud. You know that regular past-paper practice is the single most reliable thing you can do for a Year 11 cohort. You also know that five classes of thirty, one Paper 4 each, is roughly a weekend. So you set it once a month instead of once a week, and you tell yourself that is a compromise. It is not a compromise. It is the reason the grade did not move.
This is for teachers and heads of department, and it is about arithmetic rather than inspiration: where the hours actually go, which of them are recoverable, and what the evidence says about the marking that matters versus the marking that is habit.
- Teachers in England report an average working week of about 52 hours, with school leaders higher still — and marking is consistently among the largest contributors.
- Marking and feedback typically takes three to five hours a week on top of teaching and planning.
- The Education Endowment Foundation’s work on marking is blunt: the volume of written marking is not what drives progress. The feedback loop is.
- Teachers using AI tools weekly reported reclaiming close to six hours a week in a 2025 Gallup study of US teachers.
- The recoverable hours are the mechanical ones — deciding whether an answer earns the mark. The irreplaceable ones are deciding what to do next, and that is the part teachers rarely have left.
Where the marking hours actually go
Split a stack of Paper 4 scripts into what you are actually doing, and it separates cleanly into three jobs that feel like one:
| The job | What it is | Can it be handed over? |
|---|---|---|
| Adjudication | Does this answer earn the mark under the mark scheme? Applied thirty times per question. | Yes — it is rule-following against a published document, and it is where most of the hours are |
| Transcription | Totals, recording, entering into the gradebook, working out who is where | Yes, entirely. This should never have been human work |
| Diagnosis | What does this pattern of errors mean, and what do I teach on Tuesday? | No. This is the professional act, and it is what gets squeezed out |
The cruelty of the current arrangement is the order. Adjudication and transcription come first and consume the time, so diagnosis happens at 11pm on a Sunday if it happens at all. Reverse the order and the same teacher makes better decisions in a fraction of the hours — not because they work faster, but because they start with the pattern instead of ending with it.
The volume of written marking is not what drives pupil progress; the speed and specificity of the feedback loop is.
- Basis
- England’s Education Endowment Foundation has evaluated marking-workload interventions directly, and the consistent finding across its work on feedback is that extensive written marking is not required for the effect — brief, timely, specific feedback performs at least as well.
- Supporting
- Live marking — short verbal feedback during the lesson rather than written comments afterwards — is one of the better-evidenced workload reductions available to a department, and needs no software at all.
- Limitation
- Most of this evidence base is drawn from UK schools and is not IGCSE-specific. It tells you written volume is not the active ingredient; it does not tell you a specific platform works.
- Checked
- August 2026
Five things that cut marking without cutting practice
- Whole-class feedback instead of thirty sets of commentsMark the stack for patterns, not annotations. One shared document listing the common errors, the misconceptions and three model answers. It takes about a third of the time and the class gets more from it, because the misconceptions are named out loud rather than buried in margins.
- Live marking during the lessonCirculate with a pen while they work. Ten students get twenty seconds of specific feedback each, immediately, at the moment they can still act on it. Nothing goes home in a bag.
- Mark the question, not the paperMark question 4 across all thirty scripts, then question 5. You hold one mark scheme in your head at a time, you go roughly twice as fast, and you see the cohort pattern per question as it emerges rather than afterwards.
- Stop marking anything you set for fluencyDrill practice needs an answer key and a red pen in the student’s hand, not yours. Reserve your adjudication for extended written responses, where judgement genuinely is the value.
- Hand adjudication to something that does it at scaleAutomatic marking against real mark schemes is the only one of these five that changes what is possible rather than what is sustainable — weekly practice for five classes instead of monthly.
The arithmetic, done properly
Take a realistic secondary teacher: five classes, thirty students, one substantial past-paper section a week.
Five hours is not a workload problem to be endured. It is a hard ceiling on the teaching strategy, and every department in the world hits it and then quietly reduces the practice instead of the marking. The honest framing is not “teachers should mark less”. It is that the thing we most want teachers to do is priced at five hours a week, so it does not happen.
Show your head of department the number, not the pitch
If your school is weighing this up, we will walk your leadership through what automatic marking does to the five hours — using your exam board and your year groups. Twenty minutes, and teachers are welcome to forward this page rather than make the case themselves.
You will speak to the team that built the platform, in Amman. No deck, no sales sequence.
What automatic marking can and cannot do
Worth being precise, because the claims in this category are frequently ridiculous.
- It can adjudicate reliably against a published mark scheme for structured and short-answer questions, at a volume no human can sustain. This is the bulk of the hours.
- It can mark extended written answers and explain which marking points were and were not hit — which is the part that used to be untouchable. PapaMarks holds 87,000+ written-answer questions marked this way.
- It cannot know your class. It does not know that this student’s father died in February, or that this cohort was taught electrolysis by a supply teacher. The re-teaching decision stays yours and should.
- It does not reduce teaching. It removes the repetitive part that no human has time to do well at scale, and hands back the diagnosis.
The honest test is the one to apply to any vendor including us: after a term, did marking time actually drop, and did students use it without being made to? If the answer to either is no, the tool failed regardless of what the feature list said.
Frequently asked questions
How many hours a week do teachers spend marking?
Does reducing marking harm student results?
What is the fastest way to cut marking time this week?
Can AI mark IGCSE past-paper answers accurately?
How much time do teachers save using AI tools?
Should teachers mark every piece of work students do?
The goal was never for teachers to mark less for its own sake. It is that the practice habit which actually moves IGCSE grades currently costs five hours a week, and until that price comes down, most departments will keep choosing the version that fits into the week instead of the version that works.
Last reviewed: August 2026. Corrections welcome.
Want this run against your own school’s data?
Tell us your exam board and year groups and we’ll show you the same screens with your subjects in them. Twenty minutes, no deck, and you talk to the people who built it — not a sales team.
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