Every year, like clockwork, schools and Multi-Academy Trusts (MATs) brace themselves for "Mock Season."
Teachers cancel their weekend plans. Heads of Department stockpile coffee. Data Managers prepare to chase missing spreadsheets. It is treated like an unavoidable natural disaster that strikes every November and February.
But as the dust settles on the February mocks, school leaders need to address the elephant in the room: Why are we still pretending this is inevitable?
If you walk into any staffroom, HoD office, or MAT central team meeting this week, you don't hear debates about pedagogical theory. You hear survival tactics. You hear the same four frustrated questions echoing down the corridors and all of them point back to the same hidden problem.
1. The Desperate Head of Department: "How do we actually reduce this marking workload without cutting corners?"
This is the most common cry for help. A teacher marks 60 GCSE Science papers, spending up to 15 hours of their weekend doing it. According to the DfE’s Working Lives of Teachers report, secondary teachers are working over 50 hours a week, with marking and data drops consistently cited as the top drivers of burnout.
The problem is that traditional "workload reduction" advice usually involves compromise: "Just mark every other question" or "Use peer marking." But for high-stakes mocks, you can't compromise. You need examiner-level accuracy to predict summer outcomes.
The workload isn't caused by the teaching; it’s caused by the manual, analogue nature of the assessment itself.
Get more tips on how to combat the marking marathon.
2. The Exhausted Data Manager: "Does anyone have a better tracking spreadsheet?"
As a MAT grows, the data tracking gets heavier. Central teams spend hours asking around for the "perfect" template to standardise data across 10 different schools.
But a better spreadsheet doesn't fix a broken process. If your Trust is relying on complex VLOOKUPs and manual collation to figure out how Year 11 is performing in Maths, you are managing data, not leveraging it. You are trying to build a modern analytics dashboard on top of a 2012-era manual workflow.
Understand how to standardise assessment results in MATs.
3. The Furious Sunday-Night Teacher: "Why do I have to type these grades in manually?"
This is the ultimate "Legacy Tax." The teacher has already spent their weekend marking the physical papers. Now, the school’s MIS demands that they sit at a laptop and manually type "4 marks, 3 marks, 2 marks" into a digital grid.
Why are we using highly qualified teachers as human USB cables to transfer data from paper to screen?
Because legacy assessment systems cannot read handwriting, they force the human to bridge the gap between the physical exam hall and the digital database.
Learn what the DfE Education Record App means for school data.
4. The Frustrated Headteacher: "Why does it take three weeks to get a QLA report?"
The delay between a student sitting a mock and getting actionable feedback is the silent killer of student progress.
- Week 1: Students sit the exam.
- Week 2: Teachers speed-mark the papers.
- Week 3: Grades are typed up, moderated, and collated into a Question Level Analysis (QLA) report.
The Education Endowment Foundation (EEF) states that high-quality, timely feedback can add up to +7 months of academic progress. But timely is the operative word. By the time the Headteacher and HoD sit down to look at the data, a month has passed.
As the forgetting curve shows, waiting three weeks to correct a misconception is too late. The "teachable moment" for that failed algebra question is completely dead.
Master how to run a results meeting that actually improves teaching.
5. The Anxious Year 11 Student: "When are we getting our mock results back?"
While the adults are stressing over data formatting, weekend workloads, and MAT-wide standardisation, the ultimate victim of the manual marking crisis is the student.
For the first few days after sitting a mock, the student actually cares. They remember the questions they struggled with. They want to know how they did. But as the weeks drag on and the papers sit in a car boot waiting to be marked, that anxiety turns into apathy.
By the time the paper is finally handed back a month later, the psychological feedback loop is completely severed. They don't read the teacher's carefully written diagnostic comments; they just look at the raw grade and shove the paper into their bag.
How to get students to read your comments on mock exams.
The Root Cause: Treating Symptoms, Not the Disease
All five of these questions are symptoms of the same disease: Legacy Systems.
Schools are trying to run 2026-level data interventions using workflows designed in the 1990s. With 1 in 3 teachers leaving the profession within their first five years, we cannot continue asking teachers to manually transcribe data like medieval monks.
Mock marking is a predictable, annual data problem. It requires a systemic, automated solution.
The 24-Hour Pivot
We need to stop treating mock exams as a test of our teachers' endurance. This is why we built ExamGPT.
By utilising Vertical AI specifically trained on examiner logic and handwritten text, we remove the "Legacy Tax" entirely:
- The Workload: Papers are graded in minutes, not weekends.
- The Manual Entry: The AI reads the handwriting and digitizes the data instantly. No more acting as a human USB cable.
- The Data Lag: The 3-week turnaround becomes a 24-hour turnaround, providing instant, standardised QLA for the whole MAT.
It is time to stop asking for better spreadsheets and start upgrading your infrastructure.
Are your teachers still acting as human data-entry clerks? Book a 10-minute demo to see how ExamGPT automates your QLA instantly.