Marking and feedback policy

Policy details

• Date created - 01/11/2023
• Date reviewed - xx/xx/xxxx
• Date approved - xx/xx/xxxx
• Next review date - 01/11/2024
• Policy owner - xxxxx

1. Aims
2. General Guidelines
3. Foundation Stage
4. Marking Expectations

Aims

Marking and feedback should:

Celebrate children’s successes, demonstrating that their work is valued.

Provide meaningful feedback to the child.

Stimulate correction of errors or improvement in a piece of work.

Encourage children to become independent learners, self-evaluating their own and other’s work.

Assist in the assessment of a child’s performance, providing a record of achievement for teachers and parents.

Be consistent across the whole school.

Rationale

We aim to capitalise on the ethos and atmosphere of the school by surrounding the children with models of quality relationships.

Children experience people co-operating, collaborating, respecting and valuing each other.

The school should provide a calm, relaxed and supportive environment in which everyone’s worth is recognised.  If the children feel positive about themselves they will be more able to react positively towards others.

Our teaching is based on our 12 Core values and we want our children to play and work together in a responsible way.  We want them to learn how to behave well and to know what is acceptable and what is unacceptable. 

General Guidelines

Marking will be more impactful when children are made aware of the assessment criteria the teacher is using to mark the piece of work through the use of learning intentions/objectives and success criteria. Teachers must give feedback about how well individuals or groups have done based on these criteria.

Feedback and marking may fall into three categories:

1. Continuous live marking in lessons – The majority of marking at Co-op Academy Penny Oaks is live marking. This will be to the class, groups or individuals during the course of a lesson with reference to the learning intentions.  Other comments may be made to individual children during the course of a lesson that do not relate to the learning intention but may be part of a child’s individual target e.g. to use capital letters accurately.

Teachers will mark with the child present against the learning intentions giving positive feedback and offering ideas for a ‘closing the gap’ improvement.

2. Marking at a distance 

This method is shown through research to have the least impact on learning, we recognise however that some marking, especially of longer pieces of writing, needs to be done at a distance as it would not be feasible for the teacher to live mark these pieces of work during the lesson, therefore at Co-op Academy Penny Oaks, marking at a distance is kept to a minimum

Mark against the learning objective:

1. Use pink highlighter to mark any errors and green highlighter to show areas of success
2. Ensure that comments are written in green pen and reflect the schools’ handwriting style.  Remember that for some groups in the class the objective will be different.

                 Symbols may be used to highlight other errors:

 ? – does it make sense?

SP – spelling error

/ – start a new line

// – start a new paragraph

FS – finger spaces

G – guided work

I – completely independent work

3.  Self and Peer Marking

Opportunities are planned to allow children to self-assess their learning against the learning intention and success criteria.  Response partners may be used in this way.

When children are highlighting their own work or other’s successes they should mark in a red pencil or pen.

 Foundation Stage

In the Foundation Stage, teachers will generally give oral feedback to children and when written marking is appropriate it will be carried out in the presence of the child.

Marking expectations

Maths:  Work in the workbook to be marked using pink and green.  Children to respond to the pink areas in red pen.  Work in the journals to be marked in pink and green.  Response marking comments to extend learning expected in the journals along with the child’s response in red.

 English:  Phase 1 and 2 to be marked using pink and green.  Phase 3 and 4 to be marked in detail with response marking comments used to extend learning.  Children’s responses and editing to be seen in phase 3 and 4 in red pen.

Guided reading:  Marking can alternate between teacher marking and self-marking.  Children to self-mark in red pen and the teacher to mark using pink and green.

Other curriculum areas:  All work in the books to be marked using pink and green.