Teacher burnout usually gets talked about as a wellbeing problem. For a lot of Australian teachers it starts as a workload problem, and marking is the part of the workload that's invisible, elastic, and comes home in a bag.
Wellbeing support matters. It doesn't mark the Year 9 essays. The wellbeing framing isn't wrong; it's aimed at the person rather than the pile, and the pile is the part a teacher and a faculty can actually rearrange.
What the Australian data says about marking and stress
The clearest numbers come from the OECD's Teaching and Learning International Survey. In TALIS 2024, published in October 2025, full-time lower secondary teachers in Australia reported spending 5.7 hours a week on marking and correcting student work. The OECD average was 4.6. Australian teachers' marking time has gone up by 0.7 hours a week since 2018.
The same survey asked teachers what causes them stress. Half of Australian teachers (50%) named "having too much marking" as a source of stress "quite a bit" or "a lot". Only "having too much administrative work to do" (69%) ranked higher.
Australia's own workforce data points the same way. AITSL's National Trends: Teacher Workforce report (June 2026) found that among teachers who intend to leave the profession before retirement, workload was the most common reason, selected by 75% in 2024. AITSL notes that workload, work-life balance, and work-related stress have consistently been the top 3 reasons.
The burnout research is careful about causes. A 2022 study of 749 Australian teachers by Carroll and colleagues, surveyed before the pandemic, found over half reported being very or extremely stressed and were considering leaving the profession. It identified emotion regulation, workload, and subjective wellbeing as factors in the development of teacher stress and some forms of burnout. Of those 3, workload is the one a faculty can rearrange.
None of these surveys isolates marking as the cause of burnout, and I won't pretend they do. Put together, they say marking is the second most common named source of stress for Australian lower secondary teachers, it takes more time than it did in 2018, and workload is the main reason teachers give for planning to leave.
Why marking hits harder than the rest of the workload
Plenty of the job is heavy. Marking has 4 features that make it heavier than its hours suggest.
It grows with every student. A lesson for 24 students takes the same planning as a lesson for 30. Marking for 30 takes a quarter longer. Say you teach 5 classes of 28 and set each of them an extended response: that's 140 scripts. At 8 minutes a script, it's about 19 hours, before anyone has written a report comment. Add another task to the term and you've added another 19.
It lands in clusters. Teaching hours are spread across the term. Marking isn't. It arrives in blocks: the assessment fortnight, the yearly exams, the week before reports close. I've written about why that timing is structural in why your marking pile never shrinks. The point here is what it does to a person. A single heavy week you can see coming is manageable. Stack 3 of them together, on top of a full teaching load, and that's where the evenings and weekends go.
It goes home. Nobody takes a playground duty home. Marking fits in a bag, so it goes in one. I've marked my share of Year 11 History essays at the kitchen table on a Sunday night, and so has nearly everyone reading this. So it doesn't show up in anyone's picture of your week except yours. The timetable shows your 5 classes. It doesn't show the 19 hours.
The standard is set by your conscience. There's no external rule for how much feedback a Year 8 persuasive piece needs. A rubric judgement and 1 comment counts as marked. So does a page of annotations. The conscientious teacher picks the page, every time, and pays for it in hours nobody asked for and nobody sees. That's the part no wellbeing session can reach: the bar is private, so only the teacher can lower it, and it's hard to lower a bar on your own.
What you can change on your own
None of this needs anyone's permission. It's about task and feedback design, not marking faster.
Decide which tasks get full written feedback. Not every piece of writing needs individual comments. Pick the tasks where feedback has somewhere to go: a draft before a final, or a skill that comes straight back in the next task. For the rest, a rubric judgement is enough. I'd take 1 well-timed round of feedback over 3 that arrive after the class has moved on.
Use whole-class feedback for the common errors. If you're about to write "evidence not explained" for the 15th time, that's a lesson, not a comment. Read the set, note the 3 or 4 patterns, teach them in 15 minutes, and have students find and fix them in their own work. Save individual comments for what's individual.
Mark against the rubric, not against the essay you'd have written. The slowest marking is line editing: rewriting a student's sentences in the margin. The rubric already describes each level. Your comment's job is to name where the work sits and the 1 move that gets it to the next level. "Your paragraphs describe the sources. To move up, judge how reliable each one is for this question" takes 20 seconds, and it's more use to the student than 9 corrected sentences.
Write feedback students will act on. Feedback a student never uses is the most expensive kind: all of your time, none of the result. Comments that land on a draft, with lesson time to respond, get used. Comments that arrive with the mark tend not to. There's more on that in the feedback gap. The workload angle is simple: if students act on 2 comments, you only need to write 2.
What a faculty can change
The bigger levers sit with Head Teachers, because the calendar, the rubrics, and the unwritten standard for "marked" are faculty decisions. As a Head Teacher, I'd start with the calendar, because it's the cheapest fix.
Map the assessment calendar by teacher, not just by course. A calendar sorted by course can look evenly spread while 1 teacher with Year 11, Year 10, and 2 Year 8 classes has 4 class sets due in the same fortnight. Lay it out by person and the collisions are obvious. Moving 1 task by 2 weeks costs nothing and can save a colleague a lost weekend. In Stage 6, the number of tasks is a school decision too: NESA's course pages, English Advanced and Modern History among them, give schools the authority to determine the number, type, and weighting of assessment tasks, and since 2025 that has applied to Year 11 as well. A Year 11 program that sets a task because it always has is worth a second look.
Share the rubric, and calibrate before marking, not after. When every teacher writes their own rubric for the same task, the faculty does the same work several times over. The Grattan Institute's 2022 report Making time for great teaching surveyed 5,442 teachers and school leaders: 88% of teachers said access to high-quality common unit plans, lesson plans, and assessments would save them time, about 3 hours a week on average. A shared rubric is the cheapest version of that. Add 20 minutes of calibration at the start: everyone marks the same 3 scripts, compares, and agrees where the line between a B and a C sits before 150 scripts get marked. Moderation afterwards catches disagreements; calibration first prevents re-marking. More on that in consistent feedback across a faculty.
Agree what "marked" means. This is the one that reaches the conscience problem. For each type of task, write down what the feedback is: say, a rubric judgement and 1 next step for an in-class Year 8 task, and annotated criteria with 2 comments for a formal Stage 6 task. Write down the ceiling, not just the floor. A standard with only a floor drifts upwards, and the most conscientious teachers carry the drift. An agreed ceiling gives them permission to stop, which is hard to give yourself.
Where MarkMate fits
MarkMate takes the first pass. It reads each script in a class set against your rubric, typed or handwritten, and drafts a mark and detailed feedback, so your time goes on the calls only you can make and the conversation with the student. It doesn't fix workload on its own. If 4 class sets land in the same fortnight, a faster first pass still leaves you with 4 class sets of judgement, and the calendar is still the faculty's job. What it changes is the cold start: you open each script with a draft against the criteria instead of a blank margin. See how MarkMate works for teachers.
Frequently asked questions
How many hours do Australian teachers spend marking?
In the OECD's TALIS 2024 survey, full-time lower secondary teachers in Australia reported 5.7 hours a week on marking and correcting student work, above the OECD average of 4.6. AITSL's workforce data for 2024 found 23% of full-time secondary classroom teachers spend 10 or more hours a week marking student work.
Is marking a cause of teacher burnout?
No study isolates marking as the single cause, but in TALIS 2024 half of Australian lower secondary teachers named "too much marking" as a source of stress, second only to administrative work. Workload is also the most common reason Australian teachers give for intending to leave the profession, selected by 75% of those intending to leave in AITSL's 2024 data.
How do I reduce my marking load without lowering standards?
Change what gets marked and how, not how carefully: choose fewer tasks for full written feedback, handle common errors with whole-class feedback, and comment against the rubric instead of rewriting the essay. The standard holds because the feedback students actually use is still there.
What can a Head Teacher do about marking workload?
Map the assessment calendar by teacher so class sets don't collide, share rubrics and calibrate before marking, and agree in writing what "marked" means for each type of task. All 3 are faculty decisions, which is why no individual teacher can make them alone.
