The Education Endowment Fund educational research charity continues to maintain that when students are given meaningful and regular feedback from teachers and are made aware of the next steps to make to improve their work, they can make up to an additional 3 months of progress over the course of an academic year.

What is powerful to see is how well teachers at Bushey Meads are ensuring this support is in place across all areas of the curriculum.

Lead Practitioner Ms Druce and Associate Leader Mr Johnson provided staff with a high level strategic summary of the positive findings from our third and final Marking and Feedback Fortnight of the year. During the fortnight members of the Teaching and Learning Team and Senior Leadership Team conducted learning walks across all areas of the school to primarily capture all the good work that is going on in classrooms related to this important agenda of Marking and Feedback.

Some of the real highlights included: the consistent use of purple pen, excellent use of visualisers to model answers, marking for literacy in terms of feedback about spelling, punctuation and grammar (SPaG), modelling sentence starters and using colour coded highlighters to demonstrate aspects of the marking criteria in a visual way.

Marking takes time and I would like to thank all staff for the time and effort they give to support all students at Bushey Meads make as much progress as possible.

As parents and carers you can also do your bit and regularly check your children’s books to ensure that they always complete their marking stickers and respond to all green pen marking prompts and questions posed by their teachers. Do also check that all dates and titles have been underlined neatly and all diagrams labelled carefully and all loose worksheets have been carefully stuck into the books. This will enable them to more easily revise at the end of the year for their end of year exams.