Marking and Feedback

Moss Hey Primary School

Feedback Policy 

Policy reviewed: Summer 2025

Next review: Summer 2027

Context

At Moss Hey Primary School we believe that feedback is a crucial part of the teaching and learning process. 

The Department of Education (DfE, 2017) highlighted three simple words that best summed up useful marking, feedback and assessment:

• Meaningful – approach used depends upon the age, subject and particular piece being marked
• Manageable – marking should be purposeful and simple
• Motivating – engage with learners to make progress

Marking is part of a continuous cycle:

Mark → Plan → Teach

↔ Repeat ↔

 (‘Mark. Plan. Teach’, 2017, Ross Morrison McGill)

Aim of marking and feedback:

• Pupils act on feedback to make progress over time.
• They inform future planning and teaching.
• Pupils learn to value hard work and the quality of the work they produce.

Feedback:

We recognise that it is important to provide constructive feedback.  Feedback redirects or refocuses either the teacher’s or the learner’s actions to ensure progress towards a learning objective is made.

It is vital that teachers evaluate the work that children undertake in lessons, and use information obtained from this to allow them to adjust their teaching. Feedback occurs at one of three common stages in the learning process:

1. Immediate feedback – at the point of learning
2. Summary feedback – at the end of a lesson/task
3. Review feedback – away from the point of learning

Immediate feedback:

As a school, we place considerable emphasis on the provision of immediate feedback and this is done through a variety of approaches:  

• Our ‘I do, we do, you do’ learning model allows opportunities for immediate feedback and addressing any misconceptions.
• Focus group teaching allows adults to give children immediate feedback and scaffold the children’s thinking and understanding
• Positive verbal praise

Summary feedback:

Summary feedback can be given through:

• the reflection part of our teaching structure
• whole class and peer live marking and feedback
• peer and self-assessment against the learning objective / success criteria
• time for editing based on feedback given

Review feedback:

This is when teachers review a child’s work.  If there are errors / misconceptions or the learning outcome is not secure the teacher will do the following:

• Adapt planning for the next lesson
• Plan for a pre-teach (small group)
• Highlight work that needs to be improved / corrected
• Tick / highlight learning objective / success criteria achieved

Improvements / corrections:  will be highlighted or written in green (Green for growth)

Positive learning against the learning objective:  marked in black

Children responses: Children will improve, edit and correct in purple pen (purple polish)

Responding to feedback:

• For simple corrections children will be given time to reflect and make amendments in the next lesson
• The teacher may do a whole class input before children make corrections
• The teacher may start the next lesson with a focus group addressing highlighted misconceptions
• A small identified group may have a pre-teach session
• The teacher may change their planning, resources or approach for the next lesson

Frequency

A range of effective marking methodologies should be employed and there is no expectation

that every piece of work will be marked. There is no expectation that one style of marking fits all purposes or all pupils.

• Teachers are encouraged to be selective, marking only that which will have a meaningful impact.
• There is no requirement to tick every page of a pupil’s book as some work may not require acknowledgement. Marking should be purposeful and selective.
• In KS1, same day response time is built into the day for Maths and Phonics
• KS2 have time within lessons to make corrections or improvements

There are times when work should be marked. These are:

• Corrections - teachers identify where pupils are making misconceptions and reshape their teaching and provide feedback to address this. Corrections fall into two distinct areas which need the teacher’s professional judgement to address them appropriately.
• Mistakes - something pupils can usually do correctly but on this occasion have not done so.
• Misconceptions - something the pupil has not mastered or has misunderstood i.e. an error in understanding. When misconceptions are repeated by several pupils in a class, future planning is required to specifically re-teach this aspect to correct the shared misunderstanding. Teachers use their professional judgement to decide whether a whole class, small group or an individual approach is required to overcome the misconception.

In-depth, targeted marking will be used to support and underpin live marking and for Assessment for Learning.  In-depth targeted marking is more likely to be used in literacy for independent writing tasks.