When calls are made to bring back national service, they are usually backed up with the insistence that doing so would make young people more focused, more self-sufficient and more confident. Possibly, this will be followed up with a couple of digs about how millennials don’t know what hard work is, and maybe some kind of avocado-related jibe.

But last summer, when I was marking GCSE exams, my friend and fellow marker came out with something new: “All teachers should be made to mark exam scripts at least once, as a kind of educational national service”.

The more I think about this idea, the more sense it makes - and the more convinced I become that all teachers should mark at least once.

Why do I think this? Well, for pretty much the same reasons that certain people insist we should bring back traditional national service: focus, self-sufficiency and confidence.

Focus

When you are marking GCSE exam scripts, the purpose of all the preparation is brought into sharp focus. Those lessons clapping out iambic pentameter, looking at different types of rhetorical questions, annotating poems, and memorising quotations…all of that is tested in this one exam.

As important as it is to not let the exam rule your lessons, you still have to know that exam inside out to ensure your students are ready to take it. Your knowledge of the exam cannot help but improve when marking hundreds of responses. And better knowledge of the exam will naturally inform and benefit your teaching.

Self-sufficiency

When you are marking exams, you will be amazed at how many ideas for lessons and activities and projects will come to you as you make your way through all those countless responses.

You will see a response that would have been great, except that they just forgot to…

Or, you will spot a really clever way to work in contextual analysis, and from that seed will spring your own forest of ideas.

I have taken to keeping a notepad next to my laptop so I can jot down these ideas as I work through my marking. This means that when I come to plan for teaching these exams next year, I will have a whole bank of lesson ideas to draw on and won’t have to rely so much on trawling the web for activities.

Confidence

Feeling confident about marking work against a relatively new GCSE specification doesn’t come straight away.

I actually think that I was more confident before I marked than I was after two weeks of marking. But I quickly came to see that what I felt before was false confidence.

By the end of the process, you will feel as if you could sniff a script and be able to tell just from that which assessment objectives it hits. This means that you’ll be quicker and more accurate when marking mocks and exam answers with your own classes.

There are other benefits to exam marking, too, such as being able to share your expertise with the rest of the department.

Yes, it means that July is a bit hellish. You can’t count on gained time (or might be in a school where gained time doesn’t happen), but for the rest of the year, you will be reaping the benefits.

And the marking pay might mean that you will even be able to afford an extra avocado.