Feedback and Marking letter
New Feedback Policy
Dear Parents/Carers,
At Ranworth Square Primary School, enabling every child to make excellent progress is very important to us and we continuously evaluate what makes the most impact on moving children’s learning on.
Following research carried out by the Southwark Teaching Alliance, the DfE, Ofsted and the National College for Teaching and Leadership on effective marking and feedback, we have worked together as a staff team to consider what makes the most difference to our children in terms of the progress they make.
Excellent feedback from all adults at the point of children working is one of the factors that we know has a huge impact. This could be verbally or in writing and is given to children on a one-to-one or small group basis. This is called ‘Live Marking’ and it makes a huge difference to how much progress children make every lesson. ‘Whole Class Marking’ is also effective and this may involve teachers sharing parts of children’s work to show excellent examples to others or to show them and their class how to improve even further.
We are working hard to look in fine detail at what the children have achieved and then rather than asking our adults to write long comments after the children have finished their work, we have asked them to spend their time designing the next lesson to help them make excellent progress. This means that there will not be as much written marking in the books as there has been in the past. It does not mean that work will go unchecked, uncorrected or unvalued.
The children are aware that we are making this change and we have made it very clear that even though adults may not ‘mark’ in the traditional way every day, their work is very carefully analysed and assessed by their teachers after every lesson.
Our feedback policy is being developed and will be available through our website later on in the academic year if you would like to look further into it or alternatively, visit http://southwarktsa.co.uk/perch/resources/mark-less-mark-better-web-2.pdf to read the most up to date research on marking and feedback and the difference it makes to children’s progress.
Thank you for your support in this matter,
Kind regards,
Mr R Saunders