At Breakwater Academy, we recognise the importance of feedback as part of the teaching and learning cycle and aim to maximise the effectiveness of its use in practice.
It is important to distinguish between feedback and marking, as the two are often confused.
Feedback can be in written notation in children’s books or constructive verbal feedback.
Marking refers to the written marks and comments from a teacher in a pupil’s book - there is remarkably little high quality, relevant research evidence to suggest that detailed or extensive marking in books has any significant impact on pupils’ learning.
With this in mind, we focus on purposeful and effective feedback, at the point of learning, which enables children to make progress and supports them in their ability to work independently. As a school, we place considerable emphasis on the provision of immediate feedback where possible. Where notation in books is used, this is to provide a form of guidance and scaffolding to enable ‘live’ independent improvement. As such, there is no expectation of written comments from teachers in children’s books.
Our policy is underpinned by evidence of best practice from the Education Endowment Foundation and other expert organisations. The Education Endowment Foundation research shows that effective feedback should:
At Breakwater Academy, we believe effective feedback should be:
Within these principles, our aim is to make use of best practice approaches to ensure that children are provided with timely and purposeful feedback that furthers their learning, and that teachers are able to gather feedback and assessments that enable them to adjust their teaching both within and across a sequence of lessons.
We acknowledge that the feedback that works best might differ across subjects and age groups. Hence, we do not prescribe one specific type of feedback over another. What is essential is that feedback is used to help pupils improve their work and make progress; this should be evident even where written feedback is not.
Research shows that the most effective feedback for driving improvement and learning is that which happens at the point of teaching; this is where the majority of feedback happens at Breakwater. We give a mixture of individual, group and whole class feedback.
Where feedback is based on a review of completed work, the focus will be on informing future lesson planning for teachers.
Assessment is an invaluable tool for teachers.
It is important that we know what knowledge the children have, so we know how to build upon it. Learning is not a linear discipline and we know from research that it takes repeated exposure to information in order to get it from the working memory to the long-term memory. Assessment helps us to understand at what point of the learning journey each child is at and then allows us to adapt future lessons and units of work.
There are two main forms of assessment: formative and summative.
Formative assessment is the most important assessment that takes place at Breakwater Academy.
Formative assessment is an ongoing process and takes place throughout lessons and throughout units of work. Teachers can understand through questioning, looking at work in books, or discussions with children, what is being understood in lessons. This helps the teacher to 'form' an understanding of what the children know and how they can design / adapt future lessons to ensure understanding.
Using low-stake quizzes and question quadrants is also a form of formative assessment, particularly when used as part of the spaced-learning approach, as it helps to show what knowledge a child has retained over time and allows teachers to adapt future lessons accordingly.
Summative assessments evaluates learning at the end of a unit of teaching, for example, a test.
All children from Years 1 – 6 complete summative assessments in phonics and reading three times a year, towards the end of each term. Summative assessments in maths are completed at the end of each unit of work. Teachers use this information, as well as knowledge from formative assessments, to make professional judgments on children’s attainment and progress. This data is recorded, analysed and shared with parents and carers at consultation evenings and in end of year reports.
Summative assessments can, and should, be used formatively. This data can form a key part of the handover to teachers in the next year group and help to set a benchmark for progress across following year groups.
Statutory testing is carried out as required by the Department for Education and the information shared, e.g. end of Key Stage 2 SATs, which then form the benchmark for progress in secondary school.