I have yet to meet a single head or senior teacher who can answer this off the top of their heads, but it is easy to work out using government-published figures.
- Teachers work 55.7 hours/week total1, and spend 9.4 hours/week marking2. That’s 17%.
- The average teacher salary is £28,9513, but we have to add the employer’s NI contribution of 13.8% to give an employer cost of £32,946, ignoring all overheads.
- 17% of £32,946 of is £5,601. That’s what we spend on marking per teacher, per year.
- The average secondary school employs 654 qualified teachers, so the total cost per school is £364,053.
I’ll repeat that. The average state secondary school spends well over a third of a million pounds a year on marking.
- Is it worth that much?
- Could it be done more cheaply?
- What would be a better use of those resources?
References
- Classroom teachers in local authority secondary schools, from the Teachers’ Workloads Diary Survey.
- as above.
- Payscale.com, Secondary School Teacher Salary.
- As of Jan 2012 there were 3,268 state-funded mainstream secondary schools in England. There are 3,184,728 secondary pupils and a pupil:teacher ratio of 15:1. 3,184,728/3,268/15=65. It may be more useful to you to quote the number of teachers in your own school, and multiply that by £5,601.
Yacapaca 
4 responses to “How much does your school spend on marking?”
[…] solved this; why haven’t schools? There is no valid excuse. I have enumerated elsewhere how much schools are wasting on manual marking and laid out a strategy by which they can acquire all the hardware they need with a payback of one […]
[…] free up as much as 8 hours/week per teacher for higher-value activities, and they save as much as £1/3M per year across the […]
[…] has solved this; why haven’t schools? There is no valid excuse. I have enumerated elsewhere how much money schools are wasting on manual marking and laid out a strategy by which they can acquire all the hardware they need with a payback of one […]
[…] per teacher</a> for higher-value activities, and they save as much as <a href=”https://blog.yacapaca.com/2016/09/15/how-much-does-your-school-spend-on-marking/”>£1/3M per year</a> across the […]