Launch: Feedback in Action: A Review of Practice in English Schools Report

Friday, July 3, 2020

Category: News

A new report authored by the department’s Victoria Elliott, Ashmita Randhawa, Jenni Ingram, Lesley Nelson-Addy, Charles Griffin and Jo-Anne Baird has been released today and forms part of the EEF Research Paper Series.

Feedback is recognised to be one of the most cost-effective and effective interventions to improve student learning (EEF Toolkit, 2018). The Teachers’ Standards require teachers to ‘give pupils regular feedback, both orally and through accurate marking, and encourage pupils to respond to the feedback’ (DfE, 2011, p. 12). However, there is relatively little empirical evidence on what feedback practices are used in English schools, how effectively they are implemented, and how they interact with other aspects of school life, leading to a strong need for a review of feedback practice in England. This Report documents a mixed methods study of feedback practices in England in primary, secondary and Further Education (FE) contexts. A documentary analysis of school policies provides contextual information, which is then supported by rich data supplied by a medium-scale survey and in-depth qualitative interviews with 32 teachers in 8 institutions, with a minimum of three in each school. In this introduction we give a brief overview of some relevant aspects of the literature on feedback in English education.

The report can be read in full here.