Every English teacher knows the same uncomfortable truth: students get better at writing by writing more. Essay writing is a skill built through repetition, feedback, and reflection. So why, year after year, do senior students still get only a handful of full practice essays before externals?
The answer isn't a lack of care, expertise, or ambition from teachers. It's time — and more specifically, marking time.
The reality of marking senior English
Marking essays is slow, careful, cognitively demanding work. A single essay typically takes 10–12 minutes to read, annotate, grade, and write meaningful feedback for.
Do the maths:
- 30 students × 12 minutes = 6 hours per assignment
- Multiple classes = entire weekends gone
- Multiple practice rounds = simply unsustainable
By Term 4, when exam preparation matters most, English teachers are already working 50+ hours a week. Adding more full essays isn't just inconvenient — it's unrealistic.
The hidden cost: fewer opportunities to learn
Because marking is the bottleneck, teachers do what they have to do: they limit the number of practice essays.
That decision has real consequences for students:
- Fewer chances to internalise what Achieved, Merit, and Excellence actually look like
- Less opportunity to act on feedback
- Slower improvement, especially for students on the Achieved/Merit boundary
Worse still, feedback often comes back one or two weeks later. By then, many students barely remember what they wrote — reducing even high-quality feedback to little more than a post-mortem.
As Karl Jorgenson, HOD English at Westlake Boys' High School, puts it:
"It saves several hours, which means I can return feedback much faster. This matters because students still remember their essay content when they get it back, making it more useful."
The problem isn't just time. It's timing.
A system under pressure
This is the uncomfortable paradox of senior English:
- Teachers want more practice
- Students need more practice
- The system makes more practice almost impossible
Until marking stops being the limiting factor, intensive revision will remain something teachers wish they could do — rather than something they realistically can.