Embedding Formative Assessment: Reflections on year one

Helen Corsie, Assistant Headteacher, The Manor Academy

Decisions, decisions!

Picture the scene – the new Assistant Headteacher arrives at her dream job, taking responsibility for teaching and learning across the school. Her first decision to make arrives promptly in her email inbox; does the Academy decide to go ahead with the SSAT Embedding Formative Assessment (EFA) programme?

Considering that the decision had been delayed (as many things were) by the Covid-19 pandemic, the weight of that decision seemed quite daunting. I wanted to make the correct decision for my school, so these were my main points of deliberation:

• How will the programme benefit our setting?
• Is it the right time for our school to commit to a two-year programme of structured and pre-planned professional development?
• How sure can I be that the programme will deliver what it sets out to achieve?

To a certain degree, being new to the post was helpful; I felt that my objective viewpoint in deciding whether the programme could be potentially advantageous for our staff and students was a useful position to be in. I also discussed the programme in detail with my senior leadership colleagues and after some reading around the research, we unanimously felt that the time was right to commit to the EFA programme. Getting the professional development of our staff back on track post-pandemic was a priority!

The Launch

A successful launch of the EFA programme, I felt, was incredibly important to get right. The launch would set the tone and vision for the rest of the year, but it also needed to be a celebration of what the Academy had achieved for its young people so far – a taking stock if you like of teaching and learning up to this point. Consequently, we invited our Academy governors, senior leaders and those staff who had agreed to lead and co-lead the Teaching and Learning Communities (TLCs) to the launch; its main aim being to communicate the rationale behind the programme but to also create a buzz around the work we were embarking on. At the end of the launch sessions, expertly led by our SSAT mentor, colleagues left feeling enthused and excited about the potential of the programme and the questions of ‘Why this programme, why now?’ were assuredly answered.

The benefits of the EFA programme are clear. Dylan Wiliam estimates that formative assessment can increase students’ rate of learning by a staggering 25% when it is part of typical practice – that it features as a constant throughout lessons, in which practitioners adapt and modify their teaching to respond to the needs of their learners. “There is literally nothing else that can increase student achievement by so much, for so little cost” (Wiliam, 2018). The evidence from the two-year Education Endowment Fund (EEF) project (2015-2017) was convincing but most importantly the impact that schools across the UK reported in their grass-roots teaching fitted the aspirations we have for our students: we wish for them to be actively engaged with their learning and we want to raise their levels of achievement, in our mission to enhance their life choices.

Front and centre

I was very aware that keeping the EFA programme ‘front and centre’ was crucial if the momentum of the year one programme was to continue as it had started in the September launch. The nine workshops had been carefully woven into the Academy calendar, taking into account the potential stress-points for staff as they prepared students for external exams and the TLCs had also been thoughtfully constructed, enabling a mix of faculty colleagues not only in subject areas but also in experience. The particular difficulty I faced alongside my TLC Leads and Co-Leads was in dealing with the ongoing effects of the pandemic; firstly, in that weekly staff briefings had been moved online so we had no focal point for SSAT EFA displays, nor an opportunity to share formative assessment successes (and tweaks for improvement) on a whole-school basis. In addition, as we moved through the winter months, staffing also suffered with Covid-19 cases rising substantially through that period of time. This meant that the workshops were more difficult to lead and manage since staff were missing their TLC buddies to trial techniques and to arrange lesson visits with each other. A natural break in the workshops with the onset of exams between March and May came just at the right moment for me to be able to ‘press pause’!

Pause button

With a couple of months between workshops five and six, I took the opportunity to review the EFA programme, with a staff survey taking place in April. Using the results of the survey as a springboard for discussion, a meeting was held with Teaching and Learning Community Leads and Co-Leads to iron out any problems and to celebrate the successes of the programme. Despite the problems of staffing and consequent absence, it was very pleasing that 88% of colleagues at our Academy agreed or strongly agreed that the EFA strategies were fulfilling the twofold aims of the programme – to increase student engagement in lessons and to raise students’ attainment. Moreover, 88% of staff agreed that the Teaching and Learning Communities had been a useful forum in which to share experiences of practice.

However, concerns were raised in the survey that staff were having difficulty in arranging cover to pair up and pop into each other’s lessons and this was again partly due to the effects of staff absence during bouts of the pandemic. In addition, some staff felt that the EFA techniques were too numerous to focus on from one workshop to the next, so I decided that it was an opportune time to re-set the vision of the programme by recording a short video to share with staff at the beginning of workshop six. My main message was to reassure colleagues that they were the decision-makers as to which EFA techniques they would like to trial, tweak, throw out or embed, as long as the ‘big idea’ of the programme was being supported – that “teachers use evidence of students’ understanding to make decisions about the next steps in teaching” (Wiliam, 2018).

End of Year One

The following four workshops in the summer term returned to a more usual level of staffing and it gave me the opportunity to visit some of the workshops and to witness how the TLC Leads and Co-Leads led their sessions. It surprised me somewhat (in a positive way) that the personality of the Lead and Co-Lead had quite a large influence on how the workshops ran, despite the fact that the resources for all the workshops are pre-planned and structured in the same format by SSAT. I think, on reflection, that the slight variation in approach is healthy and mirrors how we may all trial the same techniques in the classroom or out on the playing field, but how we integrate and embed them into our practice will vary, to the benefit of our students.

Our very last workshop in July was shared with our SSAT mentor (after a day of conducting student and staff voice) and these were his final comments about the sessions he visited:

“After school, on a really hot day, at the end of an academic year, I was struck at how enthusiastic and passionate the majority of staff were about discussing teaching and learning and how open all staff were to improving their practice. It is clear from this that not only is the project plan being followed but a lot of hard work has been put in by the TLC leaders and EFA lead to ensure buy-in from staff and to create the positive and supportive atmosphere observed.”

In terms of feedback, I couldn’t really ask for more than that. It had been an exceptionally tiring year in education for all colleagues but the recommendation that we were on track in terms of delivering instructive professional development for staff and having positive impact in lessons by being open to new ideas and sharing formative assessment techniques was immensely rewarding. Here’s to Year Two of the programme!