Feedback should focus on moving learning forward, targeting the specific learning gaps that pupils exhibit – The Education Endowment Foundation, Guidance report 2021

We use marking, assessment and feedback to show students what they do well, the standards they have attained and enable them to understand what they must do to improve and make progress. Feedback is continually given in lessons.

Wiggins (2012) gave the following summary on what feedback means: “Feedback is information about how we are doing in our efforts to reach a goal … Helpful feedback is goal-referenced; tangible and transparent; actionable; user-friendly (specific and personalised); timely; on-going; and consistent.”

At St. Francis Xavier School we give our students DIRT work to complete regularly in lessons. DIRT is the acronym for Dedicated, Improvement, and Reflection Time. Following teacher feedback, the DIRT tasks students are given focus on moving learning forward. DIRT work is completed in green pen so that students, teachers, and parents can see the progress that has been made.

Underpinning our feedback policy is a variety of research that supports our best practices:

• Professor John Hattie (2012a) found that effective feedback is among the most powerful influences on how people learn.
• The Sutton Trust and Education Endowment Foundation (2013) also reports very high effects of feedback on learning and indicates that if done well it could have an impact of half a GCSE grade per-student, per-subject.
• Hattie and Timperley (2007) say that effective feedback must answer three major questions:

• Where am I going? (What are the goals?)
• How am I going? (What progress is being made toward the goal?)
• Where to next? (What activities need to be undertaken to make better progress?)

Studies of the impact of feedback show that “feedback is one of the most powerful influences on learning and achievement”.