Why do we mark and what do we need to mark? This workshop will offer practical classroom strategies, tips and tricks for streamlining your assessment, marking and feedback while at the same time ensuring it has high impact. We will discuss feedback/marking as a tool to help us, including drawing on the latest research evidence on effective practice. We will also address the different elements of feedback for different subjects and different types of curriculum work – right/wrong answers versus extended writing or analysis for example. Then we will talk hard strategies for marking, including live marking, whole-class feedback, coded feedback, verbal feedback, considering the place and purpose of each approach. We ask what we assess and why we assess it, including keeping assessments straightforward and streamlined rather than trying to assess everything every half-term. And we will address the elephant in the room: how much of our marking is for the students’ benefit and how much is actually performative for senior leadership and Ofsted?