Frequent & Consistent Feedback
- Weekly essay practice at scale
- Trust-wide assessment data
The Goal
Sir Bernard Lovell Academy and Clevedon School, part of Futura Learning Partnership, shared a common barrier: marking speed couldn’t keep pace with the ambition to build motivation and accountability in Year 11 English. Teachers wanted to close the gap between writing and feedback, give every essay the rigour of exam-standard marking, and remove the unconscious bias that comes with knowing a class well. Across the Trust, English leads also wanted assessment data they could trust and compare – not just at Key Stage 4, but reaching down into Years 7 to 9.
503
Assignments Set
7,650
Essays Marked
1,240
Hours Saved
The Impact with Olex
- Weekly, exam-style essay practice in Year 11, once impossible with marking turnaround
- Marking fatigue removed, freeing teacher energy for re-teaching
- Illegible handwriting made readable, opening up feedback for more pupils
- Bias reduced in marking, giving a fairer, quality-assured process
- Clear progression tracking, with analytics showing how students are developing over time
- Marks motivating students, driving engagement with their own progress
- Trust-wide assessments set, running the same assessment consistently across schools
“It has enabled us to practise writing essays with a frequency that was previously unthinkable. Students can write a full, exam-style response every week, with feedback back the same day or the next. Teachers can see how it helps with the task in front of them, but also the potential for the future as we build up more data.”
Dr Liam Condon, Head of English, Sir Bernard Lovell Academy, Futura Learning Partnership
How They Did It
- Written work completed weekly by Year 11 students
- Uploaded in bulk through scanner with StackScan
- Teachers quality-assure every batch
- Feedback printed and given back to students the same or next day
- Work stuck into workbooks (but moving to binders next term to keep pace with printed feedback)
“Olex has been brilliant for giving us data we can use to recognise and support where students are, across the school and across the Trust. We're able to set the same assessment across the Trust, and because it removes some of that subjectivity, we get much more robust quality assurance on the data it produces.”
Samantha Jayne, Head of English, Clevedon School, Futura Learning Partnership
What’s Next?
- Whole-Trust rollout across Key Stage 3 and Key Stage 4 from September
- Summative snapshots throughout the year, building Trust-wide data on Years 7 to 9
- More formative use – fortnightly homework, interventions, revision and in-class “big writes”
- Both summative and formative approaches running side by side, with teacher comments layered in