At Bushey Meads School we place a high emphasis on providing excellent feedback to students, enabling them to identify their areas of strength and key next steps in their learning journey to ensure great progress. The Education Endowment Fund (a well-renowned educational research organisation) places a lot of emphasis on the power of feedback, indicating that it can accelerate progress for learners by up to 33% in one year.

Next week we are launching our first Marking and Feedback Fortnight of the year. The fortnight provides an opportunity for all staff to focus on this hugely important aspect of our pedagogy and try out some of the strategies we have developed over time at Bushey Meads School. Many of these have been captured in our latest professional publication ‘Creating Consistency’ containing all the professional development work created across our different faculties throughout 2022.23 on the theme of marking and feedback.

Advanced Lead Teacher Mr Lyley and Lead Practitioner Mr Johnson whetted our appetites before the half term holiday in a Friday Faculty Foci by introducing the theme and focus of the fortnight through some pictionary clues – encouraging us to choose one of the tried and tested strategies in the publication and see the impact of its use in our classrooms across the school.

As parents and carers you can play your part by regulalrly checking your children’s books and making sure they are responding to all the green pen comments, next step suggestions and questions in purple pen to up level their work. Do also check that they are underlining dates and titles with a ruler, labelling and colouring in all diagrams neatly, sticking in all losse worksheets and completing all the green (peer) and blue (self) assessment stickers as appropriate.

Working together we can ensure that all our learners make as much progress as they can throughout their time at Bushey Meads.