It was a real privilege to walk around Year 11 English classes at the end of the Week 1 of our first Marking and Feedback Fortnight of the academic year. The idea of these fortnights is to capture best practice in terms of how teachers are facilitating a variety of assessment strategies in our classrooms and share this across the school.

The Marking and Feedback Fortnights also provide a termly focus for students to ensure that the presentation of their work meets the school’s expectations: all titles underlined with a ruler, the date provided at the start of each lesson, all worksheets stuck in neatly, diagrams completed and labeled carefully, all assessment stickers completed and all green pen comments and questions responded to in purple pen throughout their books.

Our Feedback policy encourages students to take real ownership of the feedback cycle and indeed, 75% of all feedback in books is meant to be student led, in relation to peer and self assessment and capturing verbal feedback given by teachers live in lessons. The green, blue and orange feedback stickers that you will have noticed in your children’s books are used to this end.

Teachers guide students to make meaningful suggestions for what is working well and what key next steps need to be taken with key pieces of work that are chosen to receive peer and self assessment.

In addition white stickers and green pen marking indicate teacher led feedback. As parents and carers do check that all green pen questions and comments are responded to in purple pen and all symbols such as SP that indicate a word has been mis-spelt and needs writing out again three times (again in purple pen).

Do check your child’s books on a regular basis to ensure that you are supporting them as much as possible to maximise their progress – if done correctly, responding to  feedback can lead to as much as 3 months extra progress being made each year – imagine the impact of that over five years!

The images show:

1. White sticker based teacher marking – providing accurate feedback and suggestions for how to improve work.
2. Purple pen responses to key questions posed by the teacher.
3. Self assessment on a blue sticker leading to work that up-levels the student’s knowledge.
4. The positive interaction of the teacher and Learning Assistant in a class to impart knowledge and provide live feedback to move the learning on.
5. Purple pen additions to improve the student’s response to a worksheet-completion activity based on gathering prior knowledge.
6. Green pen acknowledgement marking to indicate work has been completed.
7. Green peer assessment and orange verbal assessment stickers capturing ‘what’s working well’ and ‘even better if’ next steps that need to be made.
8. Green pen challenges being posed by the teacher to introduce a level of stretch and challenge to be completed in Dedicated Improvement and Reflection Time (DIRT).
9. Purple pen self-marking of a quiz.
10. Green pen symbols leading to a key task to implement moving forward.
11. Evidence of green and purple pen marking, indicating a genuine dialogue between the student and the teacher.

The marking in these English lessons was following our tried and tested Feedback Policy available on our school website:

Feedback Policy

This policy has been honed over many years to ensure meaningful feedback is provided to students to help them move their learning on and make good progress, but also minimise the workload for the teacher as much as possible.

I would like to congratulate the teachers in the English Faculty for their hard work and for supporting the students in Year 11 with their learning and progress in this hugely important year.