26th November 2021
HEADLINES
By James Saunders
YEAR 5 PRIMARY LEARNING DAY It has been great to welcome year 5 learners from St Mary’s Primary, Kelvedon, St Peters Primary, Coggeshall and Feering Primary. These learners attended one of our focused primary learning days. This particular day was themed around the creative arts. The creative arts industry has taken such a hit over the last 18 months we thought it was important to raise the profile of what is an exciting and fun industry to work in. Learners go to work across a number of our creative art disciplines under our “school of rock” theme, which culminated in a wonderful performance. Thank you Primary colleagues for your support. FEEDBACK AND PARENT VIEW Last week I spent some time talking about the importance of assessment and feedback. One of the nicest parts of my job is when I receive positive feedback from learners and parents. Thank you’s are really important and help us to realise the difference we are making. One of the toughest parts is when we don’t meet our own standards and the feedback highlights this to us. However, this feedback is just as important in helping us to ensure that we are consistently delivering the best experiences for everyone. This week I would also like to ask for your collective feedback to allow us to focus our priorities over the next year. We really value feedback from the community it has helped to inform some of the decisions we have already made. We would really appreciate it if you could help us to evaluate the impact we are having and the progress we are making to ensure that standards remain where they should be and that our learners are happy and successful. If you could take the time to fill out the following questionnaire we would really appreciate it. Just click on the link below to give your views: https://docs.google.com/forms/d/e/1FAIpQLScv TAyxrY6vHbjkwpMi7GghTN5naNRY2hSRj2WYtrSkn7TNg/viewform Feedback does not have to be negative, if you think we are doing a good job then our staff would love to
know that. I would like to thank learners and families for their support in the organisation of our upcoming learning reviews. I shall provide some more details in a moment, however, firstly I would like to talk further about the importance of feedback and guidance - a key part of our learning reviews. I would like to start by highlighting the work of the EEF (Education Endowment Foundation). If you have not come across the EEF I wholeheartedly recommend it to you. They have a great toolkit to help you sift through the educational research landscape to get to the heart of what is effective. https://educationendowmentfoundation.org.uk/ education-evidence/teaching-learning-toolkit We often look at this research to inform our own planning in school. The Toolkit looks like this:
They have carefully analysed what the research says using a meta-analysis and summarised it using some useful indicators such as the pound signs, the padlock and the orange circle with a + in it. If we take collaborative learning as an example, the research suggests that it is low cost to implement, that the evidence is very secure (lots of padlocks) and that it can help add an additional five months of progress. This should all be taken with a pinch of salt as you need to drill down a bit more carefully and think about context - which you can do by clicking on it. However, it is a good guide to get you started.