Pupil Survey: Feedback

 As part of the Department Plan for this year, we are focusing on the impact of Feedback. We believe we have a well thought out policy designed to give useful and well timed feedback to pupils. But do the pupils agree? We are doing this survey with a genuine desire to find out, and with the expectation that it will throw up areas where we need to do better.

We give feedback on pupils' work in their booklets, using clear criteria. The criteria cover whether the pupils have successfully and accurately included the language we wanted to see, whether their writing is coherent and develops personal ideas, and to what extent they are dependent on support. These criteria may be stuck into their booklets and annotated by the teacher with comments on the quality of their work and on how it can be taken a step further. We may ask the pupils to comment on their work, especially on how they feel about the coherence and personal expression of their work, and on the level of support they used. This is all timed to happen before the Speaking and Writing assessments at the end of the unit so that the feedback can have impact.

Our feedback on the actual unit written assessment is much more light touch. It again involves the pupils in evaluating the level of coherent personal expression and in recording the level of support that they needed. Most pupils challenge themselves to write in exam conditions, and then use their resources to check their work afterwards. The assessment records whether the pupils' work matches the standard in the KPI exemplars, and the level of support they needed in order to achieve this.

Our Listening and Reading assessments have been redesigned to specifically test pupils' knowledge of what they have been taught. And are intended to show pupils that they do know the French they need. We have removed things like GCSE style traps, inference, and longer texts. They are based around testing knowledge of phonics, vocabulary and grammar in individual sentences. We use them to evaluate if pupils are "on track" according to their targets. But the main feedback to pupils is the mark /50 itself, directly reflecting how much of the content they got right.

So our feedback is intended to engage pupils in a process of getting better at using their French in speaking and writing. They know what the criteria for success are. They know there's a trade-off between adventurous self expression and careful accuracy. They know to challenge themselves to do more and more without support. And they are aware that they are developing their ability to use their language with increasing coherence, independence and sophistication. Their Listening and Reading results are intended to reflect how well they know the content. And there are built in opportunities for their own comments to feed in to the feedback.

The first question in the survey was meant to be a safety mechanism. In a survey where I was expecting to find that pupils didn't agree that we were providing the most useful feedback, I was hoping the first question would at least establish that there was a good sense of progress over the course of Year 8.

Year 9 Pupils commenting on their progress in Year 8

The graph shows the vast majority of pupils did recognise that a successful start to the challenges of Year 9 showed that they had made good progress in Year 8. The fact that 8 pupils out of 50 disagreed did ring alarm bells. But when I looked at who those individuals were, it turned out that they were pupils who had been ill, absent or struggled in Year 8. The fact that they recognise they have some catching up to do is a positive, and we can support them with that.

The second question, before we got on to asking about their impressions of the mechanics of feedback, was to judge to what extent our overall messages were getting through.

In many ways, their responses surprised me. I was expecting that pupils would focus more on the topic vocabulary. And that things like developing their ability to use their French would be less salient to our pupils. You can see from the graph that in fact our pupils felt that Year 8 was about learning to give and justify opinions, and learning to get better at using their French to say things they wanted to say. These things came out higher than topic words. Linking and developing ideas still came out fairly strongly. It seems that our message is getting through. Either through the structuring of the curriculum itself, through how teachers introduce the learning, or through feedback.

And so to the questions directly targetting pupils' impression of our feedback:

The categories are: My teacher used criteria labels on my work; My teacher talked about what a good piece of work should look like; I could see from one piece of work to the next how I was making progress; My teacher looked at my work in class and commented; My teacher asked me to comment on my own work; My teacher gave me a clear idea of what was good about my work; My teacher gave me useful things to do to improve my work.

What comes out strongest is the message about progress. Pupils remember their teacher setting out the criteria for a good piece of work and giving feedback on how to improve. Fewer pupils remembered being told what was good about their work.

And then we have the things we consider to be central to our feedback policy: Clear progress from one piece of work to the next, clear criteria (on sticky labels) for marking, engaging pupils in the feedback process. These things did happen, as we know we did them and some pupils remembered them. But not enough pupils remember them as being important and having impact.

The last question was on the mark /50 that pupils get for the Listening and Reading assessments, which are essentially a knowledge of phonics, vocabulary and grammar test.

The very small red section showed that just one pupil thought the tests showed that maybe they weren't doing well enough. The tests are intended to give pupils a positive message about their French. We did away with tests that labelled pupils with weaker literacy as "bad at languages". They are tests of how well pupils know the content they have been taught. Even so, the green section shows that 4 pupils thought that their mark showed that even though they were doing well in lessons, they struggled with the demands of a test.

You could argue that we need to have tougher tests to tease out where there is underperformance. This is a separate question that we are keeping under review. We do have more than one pupil who we identified as not being on track in these tests. And the test was only a small part in the teachers' understanding of how those pupils were doing.

More important is the messages picked up by the pupils. The purple and yellow sections show 30% of pupils who did not feel they were getting useful feedback from the Listening and Reading tests. As pupils mark their own tests in class, the idea that they didn't even see their mark is surprising. But certainly, we need to do better at sharing what their marks mean.

It can be a sensitive moment, with pupils comparing their score to other people's or feeling judged by the teacher. And being a unit assessment, it comes at a time when we are ready to move on and make a fresh start. So we need to do more to pause and record the marks and allow pupils to comment on them.

So here are the things we are doing this year to make feedback more of an impactful and memorable event...

• We are making sure the objective/title of a piece of written work helps spell out how it moves on from the previous piece of work.
• We are making sure we use clear criteria (often on labels) for giving feedback. These criteria cover the language, the coherence of the writing, and the level of dependence on resources.
• We ask the pupils to comment on their work, especially around the criteria of coherence and development of ideas, and on the level of independence.
• We are putting a grid onto the front of the unit booklets for pupils to record and track their marks from previous units and comment on what they think the marks show about their learning.
• We need to continue to talk to pupils about how their work is progressing, and to show them how we take into account their own feelings about their progress.

We will have to survey pupils again in the future and see if their perceptions have changed...