A culture of risk-taking and collaboration, a focus on workload reduction and staff wellbeing, and a commitment to changing the feedback policy have underpinned the successful adoption of the Embedding Formative Assessment programme at St Julie’s Catholic High School.
The Liverpool girls’ school began delivering the two-year SSAT programme in September (2022). Just two terms in, the impact on practice is evident.
A visual representation of this impact can be found when looking at the colour of the ink in students’ books – teachers at the school use green ink. Students respond in purple.
Dr Owen McGinn, head of science and a member of the school’s associate leadership team, says that before EFA a lot of quality assurance “was measured in the volume of teacher ink rather than the quality of feedback”.
He continues: “Over time we can see that there is a change in the level and the quality of the feedback being given. There is less green ink, and the quality and amount of purple ink has increased across the board.”
This is due to teachers changing their behaviour in the classroom to embrace a variety of formative assessment and feedback techniques and students becoming more adept at assessing their own work and areas for improvement.
Olivia Knisz, assistant curriculum leader for performing arts and a teacher of PE and dance, echoes this, describing her use of diagnostic and hinge questioning and mini whiteboards to check student understanding. Her pupils often mark their own or each other’s work (in purple ink) while she circulates and provides verbal feedback.
She says: “The students joke about how many steps I must do a day. They are now asking for that feedback when I am circulating, calling me over. They are quicker to self-correct. They are more independent learners. They are taking ownership of their learning. Teaching has changed. We do not just stand at the front anymore. I am always on the move, flicking through their books, looking at their answers.”
Dr McGinn oversees the EFA programme alongside Laura Gee, the head of maths and a member of the associate leadership team. Key to the programme’s implementation, they explain, has been buy-in from staff at all levels, including senior leaders:
“Right from the beginning, the headteacher agreed to change the assessment policy. Huge amounts of written feedback were removed. Staff saw that we were focused on the quality of formative assessment but also on reducing workload and protecting wellbeing.”
The EFA programme builds on more than 20 years of research into formative assessment by Professor Dylan Wiliam and Siobhán Leahy.
It improves teaching and learning by supporting teachers to trial and refine formative assessment strategies.
Teachers meet regularly in groups, called teacher learner communities (TLCs), to discuss the programme materials (provided by SSAT and adapted by the school) and potential formative assessment techniques.
In between sessions, teachers work in pairs or small groups to conduct lesson observations and feedback to each other. Students meanwhile are engaged in peer and self-review techniques. Lessons learned are then shared and discussed across the school.
St Julie’s discovered EFA via the Education Endowment Foundation’s Teaching and Learning Toolkit. The toolkit rates feedback as one of the most effective strategies for boosting student progress and an EEF evaluation involving 140 secondary schools found that learners made the equivalent of two months’ additional progress in their Attainment 8 GCSE score, while those in the lowest third for prior attainment made more progress than peers in the top third.
At St Julie’s, a voluntary-aided school rated by Ofsted as good with outstanding leadership, the work to transform formative assessment began with a review and working party last summer term (2022). This culminated with EFA being adopted from September.
Dr McGinn explained: “We spoke to staff at all levels and assessment was too process-driven. We introduced the programme to staff in the summer term using some of the SSAT materials, sharing the research, and focusing on workload, wellbeing, and team-work – on the chance to work collaboratively.”
The school, which has more than 1,000 students aged 11 to 18 on roll with around 65 teachers, now has seven TLCs in operation, each made up of 10 to 12 staff with a mix of subject disciplines and levels of experience – from senior leadership to ECT and including support staff and PGCE students.
Ms Gee added: “We chose enthusiastic teachers from all different levels. They have been a powerful force in driving implementation. The TLC leaders are ECTs and experienced teachers, people who we felt would grow into the role and value the leadership opportunity. Having two leaders per TLC has also helped them to work collaboratively and bounce ideas off one another.”
All senior leaders at St Julie’s teach and a powerful aspect of the TLCs has been having senior staff joining them as teachers and not in a leadership capacity.
Each meeting has a particular focus. A recent session focused on whole-class assessment such as mini-whiteboards and hinge questions.
Ms Knisz says of her TLC: “It’s an open atmosphere and we have all admitted when something has not gone right. It’s a very secure place where everybody is trying new things, whether we have been teaching for three years or 23 years.”
The impact is being seen across the school with staff embracing many of the techniques and whole staff training also supporting teachers to look at examples and successes from different subject areas.
Dr McGinn adds: “We have a lesson format that contains particular elements; recent additions include teacher behaviours – circulating through the room and what we should be doing during the lesson. Some of the real progress has been around improved questioning techniques, selecting students at random to respond to questions and the use of random name generators.”
Progress has been seen with students’ capacity to assess their own work. This has involved explaining the new approach to students (and parents) but also being clearer about success criteria and how students can improve their work – hence the increasing use of purple ink rather than green.
Ms Knisz describes how her pupils use purple pen to add any missing knowledge from their work – “so they know that this is the stuff they need to work on that they did not retain in their long-term memory”.
“It’s them taking responsibility for the knowledge they are missing. Using the success criteria, they can mark their peers’ work. It stops me from having to go through 30 books. It’s a lot less workload for us. Over two lessons I get to all the pupils, so every pupil has had some verbal feedback.”
She says that having this immediate feedback means she can quickly spot misconceptions and tackle them on the spot: “It’s being confident enough to pause the lessons and spend more time on something if they have not got it yet.”
Ms Gee adds: “The approach has been explained to students and parents to ensure they appreciate that it’s no longer about green ink in books. We have trained students to ensure they are capable of assessing their own work.”
Ms Knisz has also adopted the approach for practical PE lessons, such as with the preflight checklist technique – a recap of knowledge on how to perform certain physical tasks, like a sprint race start: “Pupils pair off and one performs the task and the other assesses, using the checklist.”
The school has used surveys and other student voice to activities to get feedback from students. The staff also measure impact through the school’s QA systems and by asking curriculum leaders to identify and share areas of good practice.
Going forward, staff feedback at the end of summer term 2023 will be used to set EFA priorities for next year, but not before an end of year celebration to recognise the effort staff have put in.
Dr McGinn said the headteacher’s commitment to review the feedback policy and the fact that EFA materials have been so easy to adopt and use has led to positive feedback from colleagues.
He said that before EFA, feedback workload had been high with feedback sheets every half-term, per-class. But now workload has reduced, the staff and students are noticing the difference, and the collaborative element means that teachers can try new approaches without fear of failure.
He added: “It’s all about risk-taking, being able to take risks in a safe environment, about teamwork, working collaboratively to improve our assessment techniques, and about wellbeing and workload. Staff voice so far has been unilaterally positive.”
