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Research School Network: So a new Guidance Report has been published – how does that help me and my school? How to help your school become more evidence informed

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So a new Guidance Report has been published – how does that help me and my school?

How to help your school become more evidence informed

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by Aspirer Research School
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  • The EEF currently has 16 guidance reports, with more to be published in the pipeline, but so what? Can they really help schools to become more evidence-informed? I would argue that yes, along with a clear implementation plan, they can. Here’s how Wilbraham Primary are using the latest Teacher Feedback to Improve Pupil Learning Guidance Report to create a new feedback policy.

    The Teacher Feedback to Improve Pupil Learning report came out in June 2021 and it is a summary of research around feedback. The report provides the ​‘best bets’ on what has worked in other schools. Of course, you need to remember that this does not mean it will definitely have the same impact on your school but it can give you a good idea of where you might want to start. The report is very clear about this, with carefully chosen modal verbs like might and could. As ever, the evidence in the report needs to be combined with your professional expertise and knowledge of your school and context.

    Creating a new feedback policy had always been on the cards at Wilbraham, but is was postponed due to Covid and the subsequent lockdowns. However, the release of the report gave us new impetus to start the process. After reading the report, Andi (the DHT) and myself were quite excited about the recommendations and started discussing how these would work at Wilbraham and how best to go about implementing them across the school (Nursery to Y6). We were both keen that it would not be a ​‘top-down’ approach; we really wanted to get the teachers and teaching assistants on board from the beginning – after all, they would be implementing it every day. Wilbraham is a 3 form entry school, so we have 24 classes to consider.

    Finally, we decided to create a core feedback team which consists of one teacher from each year group. They would be the representative and voice for their year group, they would also be there to support their colleagues. We made sure that the core team had training before staff meetings so they could be fully informed and help us to shape the staff meeting around the key messages they felt were the most important.

    We are really committed to this and we have 6 staff meetings dedicated to this over the Autumn Term. We know this is a lot but we also want to get the implementation right, we want everyone to be involved and to recognise the importance of this. Each staff meeting will focus on a different recommendation with staff being able to discuss how it might work in their year group and being given the time to ​‘deliberately practice’ some of the ideas raised. Initially, the first few recommendations will be delivered to phases, rather than the whole school so we can tailor the delivery to suit the year groups. This is especially important for EYFS as none of the research has been conducted on EYFS children so we wanted to have more time with these colleagues to unpick their expertise on how they think the recommendations might look in their classrooms.

    We are at the start of a really exciting project and, whilst it is scary not knowing what the final outcome will be, we have set out a clear timeline and an initial set of principles for the policy that are guiding us, but with the knowledge that they can changed if necessary. These principles are that feedback at Wilbraham is:

    - Effective
    - Subject specific
    - Personalised to the pupil
    - Relevant to the task
    - Acted upon
    - Used to inform future planning
    - Impacts on future learning

    At the time of writing, we have delivered our first staff meeting to each phase and teachers and TAs are currently working on a range of ideas that are focused on formative assessment and that are about getting the foundations right for feedback. We are starting to really think about the tasks that we are setting in lessons and what information we will learn about the pupils from it. There was a real buzz in the meetings and we are really looking forward to seeing how this develops over the term. I will write another blog for the next newsletter updating you all on the progress.

    If you would like any further information or if you think that we could support your school with this then please get in touch.

    Sarah Izon

    Director of Aspirer Research School

    Literacy Lead at Wilbraham Primary School

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