Tag: Exams & Assessment

If you’ve spent any time in a school newsletter, a staffroom poster, or a parenting group, you’ve met the phrase “growth mindset.” It gets used as a kind of magic word — believe you can improve and you will. That version is a slogan, and slogans are easy to be sceptical of, especially once you notice how thin some of the evidence behind the classroom version turned out to be. But underneath the poster-friendly phrase is a real body of psychology research, some of it genuinely useful for parents, and some of it more mixed than the popular version admits. This is an attempt to separate those two things.

What Carol Dweck’s research actually found

The term “growth mindset” comes from the work of Stanford psychologist Carol Dweck, who spent decades studying how children respond to difficulty and failure. In a 1988 paper with Ellen Leggett, she described two broad beliefs children hold about their own abilities. Some children hold what she called an “entity theory” — the belief that intelligence is a fixed thing you either have or don’t. Others hold an “incremental theory” — the belief that intelligence and ability can be developed through effort and learning. Dweck later popularised these as “fixed mindset” and “growth mindset” in her 2006 book Mindset: The New Psychology of Success, and the idea reached an even wider audience through her TED talk on the power of believing you can improve.

The core finding across her early studies was that children who held the more malleable, incremental belief tended to respond differently to setbacks. Faced with a hard problem, they were more likely to see it as something to work at rather than as proof of a limitation. Children with the fixed belief were more likely to read difficulty as a verdict on their ability, and to disengage from a task rather than risk looking “not smart.”

It’s worth being precise about what that research showed and didn’t show. It described a correlation — a link between how children think about ability and how they respond to challenge. It did not, on its own, prove that teaching a child to say “I can improve” causes better grades. That distinction between “this belief is associated with resilience” and “installing this belief in someone will improve their results” turned out to matter a great deal once schools started trying to teach mindset directly, which we’ll come back to.

The part with the strongest evidence: how you praise matters

If there’s one piece of this research that has held up well and is genuinely useful at home, it’s a specific, well-designed study about praise. In 1998, Dweck and her then-student Claudia Mueller published a series of six experiments with children around ten to twelve years old, working with fairly hard problems from a nonverbal reasoning test.

After the children completed the first set of problems, every child was told they’d done well. Then researchers added one more line, varied by group. Some children were told “you must be smart at this” — praise for ability. Others were told “you must have worked hard” — praise for effort. A third group got no extra comment at all.

What followed was consistent across the six experiments. The children praised for intelligence were more likely to care about looking smart than about actually learning something new when offered a choice of tasks afterwards. When they then hit a genuinely difficult set of problems and struggled, they were quicker to conclude they simply weren’t clever enough, enjoyed the task less, and — this is the part that tends to surprise parents — performed measurably worse on a final set of problems than the children who’d been praised for effort. The effort-praised children, by contrast, stuck with hard problems longer, described intelligence as something that could be built up rather than fixed, and their performance held up better under difficulty.

The mechanism Mueller and Dweck proposed is fairly intuitive once you see it laid out: telling a child “you’re smart” attaches their sense of worth to a trait they can’t control and that a single failure can seem to disprove. Telling a child “you worked hard” or “you found a good way to do that” attaches their sense of worth to something they’re actively doing, which they can keep doing even when the first attempt doesn’t work. This particular finding has since been checked and extended by other researchers, including a 2019 study on vocational students that found similar effects of effort-focused feedback on motivation. It’s one of the more robust, replicated pieces of this whole area — which is exactly why it’s worth taking seriously, separately from the bigger, shakier claims that got built on top of it.

The honest part: what happened when this went into classrooms

Here’s where it’s worth slowing down, because this is the bit that tends to get left off the posters. Once “growth mindset” became popular, schools and programmes started running interventions — short workshops, assemblies, online modules — designed to directly teach children that ability is malleable, on the assumption that this alone would lift achievement. Researchers then went back and checked how well that actually worked, and the results were considerably more modest than the popular version of the idea suggests.

The clearest evidence comes from a large 2018 meta-analysis by Victoria Sisk and colleagues, published in Psychological Science, which pooled data from 273 studies covering over 365,000 participants on the link between mindset and achievement, and a separate set of 43 intervention studies covering more than 57,000 participants. The relationship between having a growth mindset and doing well academically was weak overall. And when researchers looked specifically at whether teaching children a growth mindset actually raised their grades, the average effect was small — the kind of effect size that’s easy to detect across tens of thousands of children in aggregate, but not the kind of transformation the classroom posters imply for any individual child. There was a genuinely interesting exception: children from lower-income backgrounds or who were already struggling academically showed somewhat larger benefits than the average student. For a child already doing fine, a mindset lesson on its own didn’t move much.

A separate, very large and carefully designed study — the National Study of Learning Mindsets, led by David Yeager and published in Nature in 2019 — tracked around 12,500 US ninth-graders across 65 schools who were randomly assigned to receive a short online growth mindset intervention or not. This one found real effects, but they were far from universal. Lower-achieving students who received the intervention were somewhat more likely to take on harder maths courses afterwards; higher-achieving students barely moved. Critically, the benefit only showed up reliably in schools where the surrounding peer culture already supported the message — a mindset lesson delivered into a classroom culture that quietly mocked trying hard didn’t do much on its own. In other words, the belief mattered, but it clearly wasn’t the whole story; the environment around the child had to be pulling in the same direction.

Dweck herself has been unusually candid about this gap between the research and how it got used. In a widely read 2015 piece, she wrote plainly that the growth mindset “was intended to help close achievement gaps, not hide them,” and that she’d watched schools use the language to make children feel good about effort that wasn’t actually producing any learning — a teacher saying “great effort, you tried your best!” to a child who still doesn’t understand the material. She also acknowledged that her own early work “put too much emphasis on sheer effort,” making it sound as if trying hard was sufficient on its own, when what the original research actually pointed to was trying hard with a strategy that changes when the first one isn’t working — seeking help, trying a different method, asking a better question. She named this drift “false growth mindset”: adults who say the right words about growth and effort while their actual reactions to a child’s mistakes stay exactly as fixed-mindset as ever.

None of this means the underlying idea is wrong. It means the honest version is narrower and less dramatic than the slogan: how you respond to a child’s effort and setbacks does seem to matter, praise for process is better evidenced than praise for ability, and a short talk about “believing in yourself” is not, on its own, going to transform a struggling learner. The useful bit was never the belief in isolation — it’s what you actually do around a child’s mistakes, day to day, that the research keeps pointing back to.

What this means for the words you actually use at home

Given all that, the practical takeaway for a parent isn’t “recite growth mindset affirmations.” It’s something narrower and more doable: notice what you’re praising, and shift it from the trait to the process. That’s a habit of language, and like any habit it’s easiest to build with a few concrete swaps rather than a philosophy.

Instead of this	Try this
“You’re so clever.”	“You worked out a way through that.”
“You’re a natural at maths.”	“I can see all that practice with times tables paying off.”
“Don’t worry, not everyone’s good at spelling.”	“That word’s tricky — let’s find a way to remember it.”
“Great effort, you tried your best!” (when the answer’s still wrong)	“You’ve got the method half right — where do you think it went off track?”
“I’m rubbish at maths too, don’t worry about it.”	“Maths took me a while to get too — what part is tripping you up?”

A few things about that list are worth spelling out, because the honest research above cuts both ways here. First, effort praise only works if the effort is actually connected to the outcome — Dweck’s own warning applies at home just as much as in a classroom. Telling a child “great effort” after twenty minutes of getting the same sum wrong the same way isn’t process praise, it’s a consolation prize, and children generally know the difference. The more useful move is to praise the strategy and then help them change it: “you tried subtracting first — what happens if you try adding instead?”

Second, notice that a couple of the “avoid” phrases aren’t about ability at all — they’re about quietly letting a child off the hook (“not everyone’s good at spelling”). That phrase feels kind in the moment, but it teaches the same lesson as “you’re just not a maths person”: that this is fixed, so there’s no point pushing. The swap isn’t to force relentless positivity, it’s to keep the door open — this is hard right now, not hard forever.

Third, be specific. “Good job” and “well done” are fine as warmth, but they don’t teach anything about what worked. “You checked your working before handing it in, and that’s why you caught the mistake” tells a child exactly what to repeat next time. Specificity is what turns praise from a mood boost into actual information.

And it’s fine — expected, even — for this to feel unnatural for a while. Praise for ability is the easy, quick, culturally default thing to say. Catching yourself and reaching for the process version is a habit you’re building in yourself as much as in your child, and it will feel clunky before it feels normal.

Modelling it yourself matters more than the words

Here’s the part that’s easiest to skip and probably matters most: children watch what you do with your own mistakes far more closely than they listen to what you tell them to do with theirs. If you drop a plate and mutter “I’m so stupid,” or throw your hands up over a wrong turn on the drive with “I’m hopeless at directions,” you’ve just given a live demonstration of the fixed mindset — regardless of how carefully you worded the praise five minutes earlier.

None of us are being watched constantly, and nobody manages a calm, growth-oriented response to every mistake they make. That’s not really the goal. What seems to help is narrating your own process out loud sometimes, especially when something doesn’t go to plan: “I got that email wrong — I should have reread it before sending. I’ll check twice next time.” “This recipe’s not working, let me try a different amount.” “I misjudged that, let’s see what I’d do differently.” You’re not performing a lesson; you’re just letting your child overhear how an adult actually handles being wrong — which, done honestly, includes some frustration, not just cheerful resilience.

This matters because it undercuts the exact failure mode Dweck warned about with “false growth mindset” — parents who say the right things about effort and mistakes but visibly panic, deflect, or shut down when they make their own. Children are good at spotting that gap, and they tend to copy the real behaviour, not the stated belief. If you want a child who tries a second approach when the first one fails, the most direct route isn’t a better speech — it’s being a person they’ve watched do exactly that, more than once, including on the days it’s annoying.

It’s also worth being honest with your child about the limits of effort itself, since that’s part of what the research above corrects for. Trying hard at the wrong method for twenty minutes isn’t admirable, it’s just frustrating, and pretending otherwise isn’t kind. The useful message is closer to: “if it’s not working, that’s information, not a verdict — so what do we try next,” rather than “just keep trying and it’ll come right.” That’s a subtler thing to model than a slogan, but it’s the version the actual research supports.

If you’re after a bit more structure for turning this into an everyday routine rather than an occasional good intention, Learnaroo Hub’s parent resources include some practical prompts for talking through homework mistakes without it turning into either a lecture or an argument — worth a look if you want something more concrete to work from than “just praise the effort.”

None of this is a promise that a few better phrases will transform how your child does at school — the honest reading of the research says that’s not how it works, and any advice claiming otherwise is overselling it. What the evidence does support is smaller and steadier: how you respond to a child’s mistakes, moment to moment, shapes whether they see difficulty as something to work through or something to avoid. That’s not a slogan. It’s just a habit worth building, one ordinary Tuesday-evening homework session at a time.

If you’ve got a child in Year 6, you’ve probably already heard the word “SATs” said in at least three different tones this term: brisk and factual from the school newsletter, faintly panicked from other parents in the playground, and increasingly often from your own child, who has picked up on all of it. None of that is your fault, and none of it means you’re behind. Most parents are working out what SATs actually involve at roughly the same pace their child is.

This guide is a plain-English look at what Key Stage 2 SATs really are, what genuine test anxiety can look like in a ten- or eleven-year-old, and how to support your child through the spring term without the whole household organising itself around one week in May. None of it requires turning your kitchen table into a revision bootcamp.

What SATs actually are, and what they’re not

Key Stage 2 SATs are the national curriculum tests taken by children in the final year of primary school, usually in the second week of May. For the current Year 6 cohort, the Department for Education has confirmed the tests will run from Monday 10 to Thursday 13 May 2027. Every state primary school in England sits them in the same week, under the same rules, on papers set centrally by the DfE’s Standards and Testing Agency.

Not every subject works the same way. Reading, maths and English grammar, punctuation and spelling (usually shortened to GPS) are tested with formal written papers: one reading paper, three maths papers (an arithmetic paper and two reasoning papers), and a GPS paper split into a grammar and punctuation test plus a separate spelling test. Writing and science are not sat as timed tests at all. Both are assessed by your child’s own class teacher, using work built up across the year, not a single sitting. Writing assessments are then moderated externally, so it isn’t just one teacher’s opinion.

Results come back as a scaled score, not a mark out of 100 or a grade. The scale runs from 80 to 120, and a score of 100 or more means your child has met the “expected standard” for their age. It isn’t a pass or fail in the way a driving test is — there’s no certificate, and a score in the 90s doesn’t mean your child has failed anything. Writing and science are reported as “working at the expected standard” (there’s no higher category for science) from the teacher assessment. You’ll get the results in July, well after the tests themselves are a distant memory for most children.

What SATs are genuinely for is measuring how a cohort and a school are doing against the national curriculum, and giving secondary schools a starting data point — many use the scores for setting in Year 7, though that’s a school-by-school decision, not a rule. What they are not for is deciding which secondary school your child goes to (that’s down to admissions, not SATs performance), and they don’t appear anywhere on your child as a person once they’ve left primary school. It’s genuinely a snapshot of one week, not a verdict.

If your child has an EHCP or other identified additional needs, it’s worth checking in with the SENCo about access arrangements — things like extra time, rest breaks, a reader, or in some cases modified papers are all things schools can apply for, and most will already have this in hand for children who need it. It’s a reasonable thing to ask about directly if nobody has mentioned it to you.

Realistic signs of test anxiety in a 10- or 11-year-old

Some nerves before SATs are completely normal, and honestly a fairly good sign — it usually means your child understands the tests matter a bit and wants to do reasonably well. That’s different from anxiety that’s actually getting in the way of their day-to-day life, and it’s worth knowing the difference so you’re not either dismissing something real or panicking over something ordinary.

According to NHS guidance for parents, stress around exams commonly shows up physically before it shows up as anything your child can put into words: headaches, stomach aches, and disrupted sleep are all common. You might also notice appetite changes — eating less, or picking at food, particularly around homework time or the school run.

Behaviourally, watch for irritability that’s out of character, a reluctance to go to school that wasn’t there before, or your child pulling back from things they normally enjoy — football, a hobby, seeing friends. Some children go quiet and withdrawn; others get snappy over small things that wouldn’t usually bother them. YoungMinds, the children’s mental health charity, notes that children under exam pressure often start comparing themselves critically to classmates or worrying about expectations they think other people have of them, even when nobody has actually said anything of the sort out loud.

Emotionally, the signs to take seriously are persistent worry that doesn’t ease once your child is away from schoolwork, tearfulness that seems disproportionate to what’s actually happening, or talk that sounds pessimistic or hopeless rather than simply nervous — “I’m going to fail everything” said once in a bad mood is different from a child who seems to genuinely believe it and can’t be talked round.

Place2Be, which runs mental health support directly inside primary schools, points out that this is exactly the age where children start to notice tests are being taken more seriously by the adults around them, which can amplify pressure even when nobody intends it. Ten- and eleven-year-olds also don’t always have the vocabulary to say “I’m anxious” — that’s a fairly sophisticated piece of self-reporting for a child who’s still developing the ability to name and separate their own feelings. Much more often it comes out sideways, as a sore tummy on a Monday morning, sudden reluctance about a subject they used to like, or a meltdown over something that wouldn’t normally register. Reading the behaviour, rather than waiting for your child to announce it in words, is usually more reliable at this age.

If what you’re seeing feels like more than ordinary nerves, or it’s lasting for weeks rather than days, it’s worth a conversation with your child’s teacher — they’ll usually have a good read on how your child is coping in the classroom compared with at home, and the two pictures aren’t always the same. If anxiety is significantly affecting your child’s eating, sleep, or ability to function day to day, that’s worth raising with your GP rather than waiting to see if it passes on its own.

How to talk about SATs at home without turning the volume up

The single most useful thing most parents can do is keep SATs conversation matter-of-fact rather than momentous. Children this age are extremely good at reading how seriously the adults around them are taking something, regardless of what’s actually being said. A calm “you’ve got your grammar test on Tuesday, how are you feeling about it?” lands very differently to a family atmosphere that’s been quietly reorganising itself around May for months.

It helps to name the nerves rather than talk around them. Something like “it’s totally normal to feel a bit wobbly about this, most people do” tends to land better than either ignoring the topic altogether or reassuring too hard, which can accidentally signal to a child that this is a much bigger deal than they’d assumed. YoungMinds’ advice for parents is fairly consistent on this point: acknowledge the feeling as valid, then move on, rather than dwelling.

Try to keep the goals your child’s own, rather than borrowed from you, a sibling, or another family. If your child says they want to “get all the grammar questions right,” that’s a fine, specific, achievable thing to encourage. If the goal in the room is really about you wanting a particular scaled score, children usually sense that too, even if it’s never said directly, and it tends to raise pressure rather than motivation.

It’s worth being deliberate about not comparing your child to siblings, cousins, or classmates, even in passing or as a joke. It’s also worth resisting the urge to let SATs dominate every dinner-table conversation for a whole term — ask about it, then let it go, and talk about other things. Children pick up far more from the general household mood than from any single conversation, so if you’re anxious about the tests yourself, that’s worth managing quietly on your own side rather than in front of your child.

Plenty of children ask some version of “what happens if I fail?” at some point, and it’s worth having an honest, unrushed answer ready rather than brushing past it. The truthful answer is genuinely reassuring: there’s no failing, in the sense your child probably means it. Nobody stays back a year, nobody is sent to a different school, and a lower scaled score simply tells the teacher where to focus a bit more support next year — which is exactly what it’s designed to do. Saying something close to that, in your own words, tends to land better than a vague “don’t worry about it,” because it actually answers the question your child is asking.

Revision habits that work, without turning the spring term into exam camp

Short, regular, low-key practice beats long weekend cramming sessions almost every time, and this isn’t just intuition — it’s the same principle behind most evidence-based study advice for any age. Fifteen to twenty minutes of focused practice most days is genuinely more effective, and far more sustainable for everyone’s mood, than a two-hour Sunday session that ends in tears on both sides.

Your child’s teacher already has a plan. Schools build SATs preparation into normal lessons well before May, so your job at home isn’t to run a parallel curriculum — it’s to top up, not duplicate. A few short, well-chosen sessions on things your child finds genuinely tricky will do more good than trying to cover everything from scratch. If you’re not sure what to focus on, ask the teacher directly; they’ll usually be able to point to specific gaps rather than leaving you guessing.

Past papers and practice questions are useful in small doses, mainly because they get your child used to the format and timing rather than because cramming content at this stage makes much difference — most of what’s being tested was taught over the previous two years, not crammed in the final term. If your child enjoys short, structured practice, Learnaroo Hub has SATs-prep resources built around exactly this kind of low-pressure, bite-sized practice rather than long sittings, which some families find easier to fit around normal life.

Sleep, food, exercise and friends aren’t extras to squeeze in around revision — they’re what actually protects a child’s ability to concentrate and retain anything at all. NHS guidance is direct about this: prioritise sleep over last-minute cramming, keep meals balanced rather than leaning on sugar and caffeine, and don’t cancel the things your child looks forward to, whether that’s football training, a sleepover, or just unstructured time doing nothing in particular. A tired, wound-up ten-year-old who’s revised for three hours generally does worse than a rested one who’s revised for twenty minutes, because concentration and working memory both suffer under fatigue and stress.

It’s also fine — good, even — to keep half-term and weekends mostly normal. A whole spring term that revolves entirely around SATs tends to raise a child’s sense that this is a huge, looming event, which is precisely the effect most parents are trying to avoid. Little and often, folded into an otherwise ordinary week, tends to keep both the revision and the anxiety at a manageable size.

What genuinely helps on the day, versus what doesn’t

The night before a SATs paper, the single highest-value thing you can do is protect your child’s sleep rather than their revision. A full night’s rest does more for concentration, memory recall and mood the next morning than an extra hour of last-minute practice, and cramming the evening before a test tends to spike anxiety right before bed, which is the opposite of helpful. If your child wants to glance over a couple of spellings or times tables for reassurance, that’s fine — but keep it brief and let it end well before bedtime.

On the morning itself, a proper breakfast and a normal routine matter more than anything academic. Chaotic, rushed mornings raise stress hormones before a child has even sat down; calm, familiar ones don’t. Keep the send-off low-key — “have a good morning, I’ll see you later” does more good than a big speech about how important the test is, however well-intentioned.

If your child has a coping technique that works for them — slow breathing, rolling their shoulders, a particular phrase they say to themselves — a quick reminder of it on the way out the door can help more than any content revision at that point. These are the kinds of practical, in-the-moment techniques both the NHS and YoungMinds highlight for exam mornings generally, and they translate well to an eleven-year-old walking into a school hall.

Afterwards, resist asking a detailed post-mortem of every question the moment your child gets in the car. “How did it go?” is enough; if they want to talk about specifics, they will. If they don’t, that’s fine too — dwelling on a paper that’s already finished rarely helps and can make the next one feel heavier than it needs to.

Perhaps the most useful thing to hold onto through the whole week is that SATs measure one snapshot of one week in a ten- or eleven-year-old’s life, not their worth, their intelligence, or their future. Plenty of children who found SATs stressful go on to thrive at secondary school and beyond, and plenty who breezed through barely remember them by September. Your calm is doing more work than you probably realise — not because it changes the test, but because it changes how your child experiences it.

There’s a particular kind of tired that comes from a Sunday evening spent triple-marking thirty exercise books, writing a comment, leaving space for a pupil response, then writing a second comment underneath their response, in a different colour pen, because that’s what the policy says. If you’ve done it, you’ll know it rarely felt like the thing that was actually going to move a Year 8 class forward in fractions or a Year 10 group forward in their essay structure. It felt like proof. Proof for someone else that you’d done your job.

That feeling wasn’t imagined, and it wasn’t just you being inefficient. It was, for a long stretch of the last fifteen years, genuinely what a lot of schools expected, and it grew from a fairly thin evidence base. Here’s what the research actually says works, where deep and triple marking came from, and how to give feedback that helps pupils improve without quietly wrecking your evenings.

How triple marking became “what good teachers do”

Deep marking, triple marking, dialogic marking, the purple pen of progress: different schools gave it different names, but the shape was similar. A teacher marks the work in detail, often with a written comment against a success criterion. The pupil responds, sometimes correcting an error, sometimes answering a question the teacher has posed. The teacher then marks the response too, closing what got called the “feedback loop.”

None of this was ever a national requirement. But through the early 2010s, a mix of pressures pushed it from “something a few outstanding lessons did well” into “what every book scrutiny expected to see.” Senior leaders under pressure to demonstrate progress to inspectors pointed to visible, dated, colour-coded evidence in books as the easiest thing to show a visitor in thirty seconds. Some multi-academy trusts wrote it into whole-school policy as a way of standardising practice across dozens of schools at once. Individual examples of thorough marking, praised in specific lesson observations, got generalised into “this is what all marking should look like, in every subject, every week.” Once a few schools were doing it and being held up as exemplars, the practice spread through book scrutinies, learning walks and mock inspections, largely detached from any evidence that it actually helped pupils learn more than simpler approaches did.

By 2015, the government’s own workload surveys were showing that marking was one of the biggest single drivers of teachers’ unmanageable hours, and headteachers and unions were both raising it as a retention issue. In response, the Department for Education set up the Independent Teacher Workload Review Group, chaired by Dawn Copping, specifically to look at marking. Its 2016 report, Eliminating unnecessary workload around marking, is blunt about what it found: extensive, deep, or triple marking had little to no evidence behind it as a driver of pupil progress, and in many schools it had become, in the group’s words, a “time-wasting burden for teachers that has to stop.”

The report is also direct about where responsibility sat. It found that heavy marking regimes were frequently being driven not by pupils’ learning needs but by a wish to satisfy “other, mainly adult, audiences” — senior leaders, governors, inspectors — rather than to move a pupil’s understanding on. Crucially, the report traced this back to a misreading of what Ofsted actually required. Ofsted’s own position, restated clearly in the review, is that inspectors do not expect to see any specific frequency, type or volume of marking; how work is checked and responded to is for the school to decide through its own assessment policy, and inspectors are meant to judge only whether that policy is being followed, not whether it matches some unwritten gold standard of purple-penned dialogue.

That distinction matters enormously, because it means a great deal of the marking load teachers carried, and in some schools still carry, was never actually imposed from outside. It was a defensive practice, schools protecting themselves against an inspection expectation that didn’t exist in the form everyone assumed it did.

What the evidence says actually helps pupils improve

If triple marking wasn’t the answer, what is? The most useful single source here is the Education Endowment Foundation’s guidance report, Teacher Feedback to Improve Pupil Learning, published in 2021 after a systematic review of the international evidence combined with input from practising teachers and school leaders. It’s worth reading in full if you get the chance, because it deliberately avoids prescribing a single method, and instead sets out principles that hold regardless of whether the feedback ends up written, verbal, whole-class or one-to-one.

The report’s core message is that feedback only works when it sits on top of good teaching, not instead of it. Its recommendations, in broad terms, are:

Lay the foundations for effective feedback through high-quality initial instruction and careful formative assessment, so you actually know what a pupil has and hasn’t understood before you comment on it.
Deliver appropriately timed feedback that focuses on moving learning forward, rather than simply flagging what went wrong.
Plan for how pupils will receive and act on feedback, because feedback that nobody reads, understands or has time to apply doesn’t do anything.
Carefully consider how to give written feedback, choosing methods that are proportionate to what they add.
Carefully consider how to give purposeful verbal feedback, which the evidence treats as equally legitimate to written feedback, not a lesser substitute for it.
Design a school feedback policy that supports and exemplifies these principles, while leaving decisions about specific methods and timing to teachers’ own professional judgement.

Two things stand out from that list. First, specificity matters more than volume: feedback that tells a pupil exactly what to do next, tied to a clear learning goal, consistently outperforms generic praise or generic correction, however much of it there is. Second, the EEF is explicit that a policy should never mandate a single method of feedback delivery across every subject and every lesson, because what works for correcting a maths calculation is not the same as what works for developing an extended piece of historical writing.

It’s also worth knowing what feedback can achieve when it’s done well. The EEF’s wider Teaching and Learning Toolkit, which reviews evidence across dozens of classroom strategies, rates feedback as one of the highest-impact approaches available to teachers, associated with an average of around six additional months’ progress for pupils compared with those who don’t receive it, and at very low cost. That’s a genuinely strong effect. The catch, which the guidance report spends most of its length unpacking, is that the size of that effect depends entirely on the quality and specificity of the feedback, not on how many hours were spent producing it.

Whole-class feedback: the lower-workload alternative with evidence behind it

The practice that’s grown fastest in schools trying to follow both the DfE workload report and the EEF guidance is whole-class feedback, sometimes called WCF. Instead of writing an individual comment in every book, the teacher reads through a set of work, notes the common errors, misconceptions and standout examples of good practice on a single sheet or slide, and then delivers that feedback to the whole class at the start of the next lesson. Pupils then respond directly in their books: correcting a specific error, attempting a follow-up question, or redrafting a section, guided by what’s been shared.

Done well, this does several things that individual deep marking often doesn’t. It lets a teacher read a full set of books once, at a reasonable pace, rather than writing bespoke commentary thirty times over. It means every pupil gets feedback on the actual patterns in their own work, because the teacher has genuinely read it, rather than a rotating set of generic stock phrases. And because the feedback is delivered and then acted on in lesson time, pupils get a structured chance to do something with it immediately, which is exactly the “plan for how pupils receive and use feedback” principle the EEF guidance emphasises. Several secondary schools that have documented their move to whole-class feedback report a substantial cut in weekly marking time, without a corresponding drop in the quality of what pupils actually receive, and in some cases with clearer, more actionable comments than they were managing under a triple-marking regime.

None of this means whole-class feedback is automatically better in every context. A one-word spelling correction on a piece of extended writing might genuinely need an individual comment; a common misconception about equivalent fractions across an entire class is exactly what whole-class feedback is built for. The point isn’t to replace one rigid rule with another. It’s to match the method to what will actually help pupils improve, and to stop assuming that “individual and lengthy” automatically means “more effective.”

Verbal feedback has a real place, not a lesser one

Verbal feedback sometimes gets treated in school policies as the poor relation of written comments, something you do when you haven’t had time to “properly” mark. The evidence doesn’t support that hierarchy. Live, in-the-moment feedback, given while you’re circulating during independent work, has a real advantage that no written comment can match: it arrives while the pupil is still doing the task, which means they can act on it immediately rather than three days later when the exercise book comes back and the thinking behind their original answer has gone cold.

The EEF guidance treats verbal feedback as sitting on exactly the same footing as written feedback, subject to the same underlying principles. That means it needs to be specific rather than a passing “good work,” it needs to give the pupil something concrete to do next, and ideally it needs some form of record, even a quick tick, initial or annotation in the book, so there’s a trace that it happened and what it covered, both for the pupil’s own reference and for anyone checking books later. A quiet word to a pupil that says exactly what to change in their next paragraph, followed by thirty seconds watching them make that change, can do more for their learning than a lengthy written comment they skim and forget. What matters is the same thing that matters for written feedback: is it specific, is it timely, and does the pupil actually get a chance to use it.

Why more marking doesn’t equal more learning

It’s worth sitting with why the “more marking, more progress” assumption took hold, because the logic behind it feels intuitive even once you know the evidence doesn’t back it up. Marking is visible. It produces a physical artefact — a book full of comments — that can be shown to a line manager, a governor, a parent at parents’ evening. Progress in a pupil’s actual understanding is much harder to see directly, so schools reached for the thing they could see instead, and treated it as a proxy.

But a proxy is not the same as the thing itself, and the 2016 DfE review was explicit that quantity and quality had been conflated. Spending longer on a comment doesn’t make it more useful to the pupil reading it; if anything, very long comments are more likely to bury the one thing a pupil actually needs to act on under several things that don’t matter as much. There’s also a workload economics problem specific to deep marking: if the teacher is doing substantially more cognitive work on a piece than the pupil originally put into it, the incentives get skewed. Pupils learn that mistakes get quietly fixed for them, or that the “real” work happens in the second, teacher-guided pass, which can undercut the very independence and resilience that good feedback is supposed to build.

None of this is an argument for marking less carefully. It’s an argument for marking differently: reading pupils’ work closely enough to spot the pattern that matters, saying that clearly, and then getting out of the way so pupils have to do the thinking themselves. That’s harder to standardise into a tick-box policy than “write a comment in green pen every lesson,” which is probably part of why it took a national workload crisis to shift practice at scale.

Following your school’s marking policy without the guilt

Most schools have moved a long way from triple marking since 2016, but plenty of teachers still carry some residual guilt about not doing “enough,” particularly if they trained during the deep-marking years or moved from a school where it was still the norm. A few practical ways to reconcile a sensible policy with a clear conscience:

Read your actual policy, not the version in your head. Many marking policies were rewritten after 2016 to explicitly allow whole-class feedback, verbal feedback and simple codes, but the memory of the old expectations lingers longer than the policy itself. Check what’s actually written down before assuming you owe more.
Use a consistent shorthand for routine errors. A shared set of codes for spelling, punctuation or a recurring misconception lets pupils correct their own work with your guidance, which is often more useful for their learning than you writing the correction out in full.
Batch your close reading, then deliver feedback live. Skim a set of books to identify the two or three things worth addressing, then spend the follow-up lesson on those points with the whole class, rather than writing the same comment thirty separate times.
Keep a light evidence trail for verbal feedback. A quick initial, tick or one-line note in the margin is usually enough to show feedback happened and roughly what it covered, without needing a full written commentary to accompany it.
Push back, calmly, with the evidence. If a line manager or book scrutiny asks for something beyond what your policy requires, both the EEF guidance and the DfE workload review are freely available, citable documents. It’s entirely reasonable to reference them in a conversation about what’s proportionate.
Protect the time you save for the feedback that actually needs it. Whole-class and verbal feedback should free up time for the pieces of work — the mock exam, the extended essay, the piece going towards a moderated assessment — where detailed individual comment genuinely earns its keep.

One practical drag on all of this is how long it takes to create fresh checking material in the first place, whether that’s a quick low-stakes quiz to establish what’s actually gone in before you plan your next lesson, or a set of retrieval questions to structure a whole-class feedback session around. Having a ready-made bank of curriculum-aligned quizzes and checks, like the ones built into Learnaroo Hub, can take that particular piece of the workload off your plate, leaving more of your time for the feedback conversation itself rather than the business of assembling questions to have that conversation about.

The uncomfortable truth about the deep-marking years is that a huge amount of good, well-intentioned teacher time went into something the evidence never really supported, largely because it was easier to point at than to argue against. The upside is that the correction is now well established, evidenced from two directions at once: a government workload review that named the problem plainly, and an EEF guidance report that sets out what to do instead. You don’t need to choose between helping pupils improve and protecting your evenings. The evidence suggests that, done well, the first genuinely makes the second easier, not harder.

Somewhere in most heads’ calendars is a conversation they’ve had more than once: a good teacher, sitting across the desk, handing in their notice. The instinct is to reach for the obvious explanation — pay, or Ofsted, or “the job’s just changed.” Sometimes that’s true. But the national data on why teachers actually leave is more specific than the staffroom folklore, and more useful, because some of it points at things a headteacher can genuinely change without waiting for a pay review or a policy shift from Westminster.

This matters because retention isn’t a soft HR concern sitting alongside the real business of school leadership. It’s a curriculum issue, a safeguarding issue and a budget issue all at once. Every departure that could have been prevented is a loss of continuity for pupils, a hole in the timetable, and a cost that rarely shows up as a single line in the budget but is felt across the whole year.

What actually predicts a teacher leaving — the data, not the folklore

The Department for Education’s Working Lives of Teachers and Leaders survey is the closest thing England has to a proper national pulse-check on this, and its 2024 wave (fieldwork January–May 2024, over 10,000 teachers and leaders, run by IFF Research and UCL’s Institute of Education) is uncomfortable reading. Thirty-six per cent of respondents said they were thinking about leaving teaching within the next 12 months, up from 25% two years earlier. Job satisfaction fell sharply too: only 46% said they were satisfied “most of the time,” down from 58% the previous year, and 19% said they were rarely satisfied at all.

Ask people what’s actually driving that, and the answers cluster tightly. NFER’s synthesis of the same working-lives data found that 90% of teachers who were considering leaving in 2023/24 cited high workload as a factor. The DfE survey itself found stress or poor wellbeing cited by 84%, and feeling undervalued by 83%. Pay matters — more on that below — but it isn’t the headline reason teachers give when you actually ask them. Workload, stress and feeling undervalued are.

What’s genuinely useful for a head is that the “why” differs by phase, and that difference tells you where to look first. In primary schools, 78% of those considering leaving cited pressure relating to pupil outcomes or inspection. In secondary schools, 59% pointed to pupil behaviour. In special schools and PRUs, 54% cited a lack of support from superiors and 44% a lack of progression opportunities. That’s not one problem with one fix — it’s three different working environments producing three different pressure points, and a retention strategy that treats them as identical will miss most of what’s actually going on in your building.

There’s a wellbeing gap between leaders and classroom teachers worth noting too. The same survey found 63% of teachers said work had negatively affected their mental health, against 55% of leaders — but leaders were more likely to feel supported (78% agreed their line manager supported their wellbeing, versus 62% of teachers) and more likely to have access to support schemes (79% versus 54%). Heads often assume their staff have roughly the access and support they themselves have. The data says that’s usually not true.

NFER’s most recent Teacher Labour Market in England report adds a cautious note of progress: 26% of teachers described their workload as acceptable in 2024/25, up from just 17% in 2021/22, and vacancy rates eased slightly. But the same report flags pupil behaviour as one of the fastest-growing contributors to workload since the pandemic, and recommends an independent review of behaviour-related workload and pastoral care specifically — which lines up closely with what secondary teachers are telling the DfE survey directly.

Leaving teaching altogether is a different problem from leaving your school

It’s worth being precise about a distinction that gets flattened in most retention conversations: a teacher who moves to the school down the road and a teacher who leaves the profession entirely are not experiencing the same problem, even if both show up as “attrition” in your workforce figures.

Research on teacher movement consistently shows that changing schools is driven mainly by local, immediate working conditions — leadership style, workload distribution, team culture, how supported someone feels day to day. Leaving the profession altogether tends to be driven by broader, more structural dissatisfaction: workload as a whole way of working, pay relative to other graduate careers, and a sense that the job itself has changed for the worse. Research summarised by the Chartered College of Teaching notes that a meaningful proportion of teachers who leave state schools — around half — don’t leave education at all: they move into the independent sector or into teaching-related roles rather than exiting the profession outright. That’s a real signal. It suggests that for a large group of departures, the problem isn’t “teaching” as a vocation, it’s the specific conditions of the specific school they were in.

That distinction should change how you read your own leavers list. Someone moving three miles down the road to a school with a calmer behaviour system and a lighter meeting load is telling you something fixable and local. Someone leaving the sector entirely after fifteen years is telling you something bigger, and while you can’t single-handedly fix national pay policy, you can still influence whether your school was the reason they gave up, or the reason they stayed as long as they did.

What you can actually change, even though pay and Ofsted aren’t up to you

It’s tempting to treat retention as something that lives entirely outside a headteacher’s control — set by pay review bodies and inspection frameworks neither of which you get a vote on. That’s true of the two biggest national levers. It is not true of the four things the data says matter most day to day.

Workload culture

Workload doesn’t mean “the job is hard.” It means the accumulation of marking policies, planning expectations, meeting frequency and administrative asks that a school chooses to run, largely independently of what any external body actually requires. Auditing what you genuinely ask of staff against what you’re actually obliged to provide is usually the single highest-leverage exercise a leadership team can do, and it costs nothing but time. Ready-made, curriculum-aligned planning and marking resources — something like Learnaroo Hub’s teacher library — can shave a modest amount off the weekly grind for some staff, but it’s one small lever among several, not a substitute for genuinely reducing what a school asks of its teachers.

Behaviour support

Given that pupil behaviour is the single most cited reason secondary teachers consider leaving, and one of the fastest-growing drivers of workload nationally, a consistent, visibly-backed whole-school behaviour system is a retention intervention as much as a discipline one. The specific thing staff report valuing isn’t a stricter policy on paper — it’s knowing that when they call for support, someone senior actually shows up. A behaviour policy nobody enforces is worse for retention than having no policy at all, because it signals the gap between what leadership says and what leadership does.

Career development

This mattered most acutely in special schools and PRUs, where 44% of those considering leaving cited a lack of progression opportunities, but it isn’t confined to that phase. Career development doesn’t have to mean a promotion pipeline everyone can’t realistically climb — it can mean protected CPD time that isn’t quietly cancelled under pressure, honest conversations about what a TLR or a subject lead role would actually involve, and making sure good teachers know you’ve noticed them before they start looking elsewhere for someone who will.

Feeling heard

Eighty-three per cent citing “feeling undervalued” as a factor in considering leaving is not a small number, and it’s not fixed by an end-of-term email thanking staff for their hard work. It’s fixed by staff seeing a visible link between something they raised and something that changed. A staff survey that never produces a visible outcome trains people to stop bothering to answer it honestly — which then quietly poisons your ability to read the room at all.

The real cost when a good teacher walks

The cost of losing a teacher rarely appears as one number in a budget, which is part of why it’s easy to underweight against more visible pressures. It sits across several lines: the direct cost of recruitment and advertising, the cost of supply cover while a post sits vacant or a replacement gets up to speed, and the much harder to quantify cost of lost institutional knowledge — the relationships with pupils and parents, the informal understanding of “how this department works,” the mentoring capacity that walks out with an experienced colleague.

On supply cover specifically, one widely cited (if now dated) analysis put annual spending on supply teachers across England’s schools at around £821m, roughly £168 per pupil — and schools sourcing cover through an agency typically pay 20–30% above the base daily rate once agency margins are added. Many schools now set aside dedicated budget lines specifically to absorb this, sometimes running into tens of thousands of pounds a year for a single school, precisely because unplanned absence and vacancy cover has become a predictable, recurring cost rather than an occasional shock.

The harder-to-cost part is what happens to the colleagues who stay. Every vacancy left unfilled, or filled by short-term supply, means someone else absorbing cover lessons, extra planning, or a class that’s now unsettled by a run of different adults in front of it. That’s a direct line back to the workload data above: unfilled vacancies don’t just cost money, they actively worsen the workload pressure that was probably part of why the last person left.

Running an exit interview that actually surfaces the truth

Most schools already do something called an exit interview. Fewer schools do one that produces honest information, because the format most commonly used — a form handed over on someone’s last week, or a conversation with the line manager they may have specific grievances about — is almost engineered to produce polite, non-committal answers.

A few practical changes make a genuine difference:

Someone other than the direct line manager should conduct it. A teacher leaving partly because of how a department is run will not tell the head of that department the real reason, however well-intentioned that person is.
Timing matters. A conversation held weeks before departure, once a new job is secured and there’s nothing left to lose by being candid, tends to produce far more useful information than one held on the final day when the instinct is simply to leave on good terms.
Confidentiality has to be real, not just stated. If staff have any reason to believe specifics will be traced back to them, or fed straight to the person they’re describing, they’ll default to vague, safe answers.
Ask about specifics, not generalities. “Was there a particular week, meeting or decision that made you start looking?” tends to surface more than “Why are you leaving?”
Look for the pattern across leavers, not the story in any one interview. One person’s account might be about a personality clash. Three people independently describing the same meeting structure or the same unsupported behaviour incident is a systemic finding, and it needs to be treated as one.
Close the loop. If exit interviews consistently flag something and nothing visibly changes, current staff will hear about it through the grapevine just as reliably as they’d hear about a positive change — and it will cost you the credibility of every future survey and interview you run.

It’s also worth running the mirror version of this with staff who stay: a short, low-pressure “stay interview” for people a few years into post, asking what’s keeping them and what would tip the balance the other way. It costs almost nothing and often surfaces the same themes as exit interviews, but early enough to act on them.

Retention is a hundred small decisions, not one big one

There is no single lever that fixes teacher retention, and any advice that promises one should be treated with suspicion. National pay and inspection policy sit outside any individual head’s control, and pretending otherwise sets an impossible bar. But the data is consistent, from the DfE’s own national survey through to NFER’s labour market analysis: workload, behaviour support, feeling valued and a credible route for career development are the things staff actually cite, and every one of them is shaped, in practice, by decisions a school makes about its own culture.

The heads who keep good staff longest aren’t necessarily running the calmest schools or the best-resourced ones. They’re the ones where the gap between what leadership says it values and what it actually asks of people day to day is smallest — and where, when someone does eventually walk, the school is honest enough with itself to find out why.

Say “remote learning” in a staffroom and watch the room’s mood shift. For most teachers it means 2021: badly lit laptop screens, muted mics, a Year 8 boy’s cat walking across the keyboard mid-explanation, and the slow realisation that shouting “can everyone see my screen?” into the void was now a permanent part of the job. It’s tempting to file the whole thing under “things we never have to do again.”

That would be a mistake, and not just a sentimental one. Strip away the emergency conditions of a national lockdown and there’s a smaller, more useful set of remote and blended techniques that still solve real problems: the pupil who’s off school for eight weeks with a broken leg, the maths class that never has enough lesson time for both new content and practice, the Year 11 group who need to revisit trigonometry at 9pm the night before a mock. The evidence base built up during and after the pandemic — mainly the Education Endowment Foundation’s rapid evidence assessment and the Department for Education’s ongoing guidance — is actually quite specific about what worked, what didn’t, and where the limits are. Worth revisiting with a clearer head.

What the evidence actually found

In April 2020, the EEF published a rapid evidence assessment on remote learning, drawing on around 60 existing systematic reviews and meta-analyses rather than waiting to generate new pandemic-specific data (there wasn’t time). It’s held up well as a reference point precisely because it wasn’t written in a panic — it was a synthesis of what research already showed about learning outside the classroom, applied to the situation schools were suddenly in.

A few findings are worth pulling out because they cut against what a lot of us assumed at the time.

Teaching quality mattered more than delivery method. The EEF’s conclusion was blunt: how you deliver a lesson matters far less than whether the core elements of good teaching are present — clear explanations that build on what pupils already know, well-designed scaffolding, and feedback pupils can act on. A brilliantly explained concept on a recorded video beats a rushed, unstructured live lesson every time, and vice versa. The medium isn’t the thing to obsess over.

Live lessons weren’t the automatic winner they felt like. This one surprised a lot of schools that poured effort into replicating a live timetable online. The EEF’s own follow-up commentary on this is worth quoting directly: schools “should not necessarily assume that live lessons are intrinsically better than pre-recorded alternatives,” because live delivery makes it genuinely hard to build in real interaction and flexibility, and feedback can end up worse than a well-designed sequence of a recorded segment followed by a task and a proper check for understanding. The evidence on live-versus-recorded was mixed, not a clean win for either — and the EEF’s practical suggestion was that a mix of both, used deliberately, tends to capture the benefits of each rather than forcing everything through one format.

Technology access was the single biggest determinant of whether any of this worked at all. Every other finding is somewhat academic if a pupil can’t get online reliably. The review flagged access to technology — devices, connectivity, a workable space to use them — as the precondition for everything else, and specifically called out disadvantaged pupils as most likely to be locked out.

Peer interaction still mattered, even at a distance. Structured opportunities for pupils to interact — peer marking, peer feedback, live discussion slots — supported motivation and helped pupils get unstuck. Remote learning that isolated pupils entirely from each other tended to lose them faster.

Independent learning skills can’t be assumed. A recurring theme was that remote approaches only work if pupils can regulate their own learning: start a task without someone standing over them, notice when they’re stuck, ask for help. Younger pupils and pupils with SEND typically need this taught and scaffolded explicitly rather than assumed as a given, which is exactly why remote learning hit some year groups far harder than others.

Put together, the picture isn’t “remote learning doesn’t work” or “remote learning works fine.” It’s closer to: remote learning is a delivery mechanism, and it inherits all the strengths and weaknesses of whatever teaching gets poured into it, minus a fair amount of the structure, social contact and easy monitoring a classroom gives you for free.

Where blended and remote approaches still earn their keep

The pupil who’s off long-term

This is the clearest current use case, and it’s the one the Department for Education has actually written guidance on. The DfE’s Providing Remote Education guidance for schools (first published in 2022, last updated August 2024) is explicit that remote education is a last resort, for pupils who are well enough to learn but unable to attend in person — the guidance specifically mentions short-term infectious illness, recovery from an operation, or recovery from an injury. It also allows for remote provision on a case-by-case basis as part of a structured reintegration plan for pupils with SEND or mental health needs who are working back up to full attendance.

Two things in that guidance are worth teachers actually reading rather than assuming. First, it’s framed around short-term absence, not an alternative to attendance — the DfE is clear that remote education should never be treated as equivalent to being in school. Second, it puts responsibility on schools to check what a family can actually manage before setting expectations: auditing device and internet access, thinking about the home study environment, and not creating unreasonable workload for either staff or families. A pupil off for six weeks with glandular fever doesn’t need a recreated version of their full timetable delivered live; they need a proportionate, well-sequenced set of core content they can work through, with a clear point of contact for questions. The DfE also points schools toward ready-made content — Oak National Academy is the example it names — rather than expecting every teacher to build a parallel curriculum from scratch on top of their normal workload.

Flipped-classroom homework

The flipped model — pupils watch a short explainer covering new content at home, then use lesson time for practice, application and the bits that actually need a teacher in the room — has aged well precisely because it matches the EEF’s finding about live versus recorded delivery. The straightforward explanation of a new method (how to balance an equation, how to structure a topic sentence, the steps of a titration) doesn’t need a teacher live in the room; it needs to be clear, well-sequenced, and rewatchable. What does need a teacher in the room is watching pupils apply it, catching the misconception in real time, and adjusting on the spot — which is exactly the kind of live, responsive teaching that’s hardest to replicate on a screen.

It only works, though, if pupils actually watch the thing. Build in a very short accountability check — three questions, submitted before the lesson — so you know who engaged and who didn’t, and plan the first ten minutes of the lesson to work for both groups.

Revision resources

This is the least controversial use of recorded content and arguably the best return on the time it takes to make it. A bank of short, focused clips — one method, one concept, five minutes — lets pupils revisit exactly the thing they’re stuck on, at the point they’re stuck on it, rather than waiting for the next lesson or flicking through an exercise book looking for the page. It’s self-paced by design, which sidesteps the independent-learning problem the EEF flagged, because pupils are choosing to use it to solve a specific problem rather than being expected to sustain a whole lesson’s worth of attention alone. If your department is building a shared library like this, it’s worth keeping it somewhere pupils and parents can find without you re-explaining the same method over email every March — a shared home-learning space like Learnaroo Hub is one way to do that without adding to your own admin.

The access gap hasn’t closed — it’s just less visible

It’s easy to assume the digital divide was a 2020 problem that’s since been solved by three years of everyone buying more devices. Ofcom’s data doesn’t support that. In March 2020, 11% of UK homes had no internet access at all; by March 2021 that had fallen to 6% — still around 1.5 million homes offline. Exclusion wasn’t evenly spread: households aged 65+ had the highest rate at 18%, and lower-income and financially vulnerable households were also disproportionately affected. Separately, roughly a quarter of vulnerable children faced difficulty accessing a device for remote learning during lockdown — not no access at all, necessarily, but not reliable access either: a shared laptop with three siblings and a working parent also needing it isn’t the same as having one.

The overall improvement is real, but it flatters the picture. A household can be “connected” and still be a phone with a data cap, a single ageing laptop split between children, or a signal that drops every time it rains. None of that shows up in a headline connectivity percentage, and none of it makes a two-page written homework task, sent home assuming a printer and a quiet desk, a safe assumption anymore than it was in 2021. Any teacher setting remote or blended work now is still setting it into that gap, even if it’s narrower and less visible than it used to be. The safest default is to check rather than assume — a quick, non-judgemental audit of what a class actually has at home before you build a unit around them having it.

Recording an explainer video pupils will actually watch

If flipped homework or a revision library is genuinely useful for your subject, the return on a well-made short video is high and the barrier to making one is lower than it feels. A few things that actually make a difference:

Keep it short. Four to six minutes for one clear idea. A twenty-minute recorded lesson gets abandoned at minute six; a five-minute video on “solving two-step equations” gets watched and rewatched.
Plan the structure before you press record. You don’t need a script, but you do need to know your three or four points in order. Rambling into a recording wastes your evening and your pupils’ attention.
Prioritise audio over video. Pupils will forgive a wobbly camera or a plain background. They won’t forgive audio they have to strain to hear. A £20 clip-on mic does more for watchability than any amount of lighting.
Show your working, not your face. For anything procedural — a maths method, an experiment, an essay structure — a screen recording with your voice over the worked example beats a talking head. It’s the clear explanation and scaffolding the EEF review flagged as the thing that actually matters, not the production value.
Build in a pause. Stop, set a step for pupils to try themselves, then reveal the answer. It’s a small thing, but it’s the difference between passive viewing and something closer to the interaction a live lesson gives you for free.
Caption it. For SEN pupils, EAL pupils, and pupils watching on a bus with the sound off, captions aren’t a nice-to-have. Most recording and hosting tools now auto-generate them; it takes minutes to check and correct.
Don’t chase a perfect take. Pupils are used to imperfect video. A stumble with a laugh and a “let me just say that again” is fine and, if anything, makes it easier to watch. Endless re-recording is not a good use of a Tuesday evening.

Why it can’t replace the classroom for most pupils, most of the time

The DfE’s own guidance is unambiguous on this, and it’s worth having the line to hand for the parent who suggests their child would “just do better at home on the laptop”: remote education should never be treated as equivalent to attending school in person, and it isn’t a substitute for a school’s normal attendance or, separately, its suspension procedures — a suspended pupil must still have work set and marked, but that’s not the same provision as a pupil learning remotely by agreement.

The reasons line up with what the evidence review found. A teacher in the room is doing constant, low-stakes formative assessment — reading the room, spotting the pupil who’s nodded along but clearly hasn’t got it, adjusting the next five minutes in response. That’s very hard to replicate at a distance, live or recorded. Peer interaction, which the EEF found genuinely supported motivation and learning, happens naturally in a classroom and has to be deliberately engineered online, which most schools don’t have the capacity to do well at scale. And there’s a simpler point underneath all of it: school is also where a lot of pupils get seen. A form tutor noticing a change in mood, a TA noticing a pupil hasn’t eaten, a teacher noticing a bruise — that daily in-person contact carries a safeguarding function that no amount of well-designed video content replaces, which is part of why the DfE frames remote provision as a bounded, last-resort exception rather than a parallel option.

None of that makes remote and blended approaches useless — quite the opposite, used in the right place they solve real problems well. But the evidence points the same direction from every angle: they’re a supplement for specific situations, not a substitute for the everyday work of teaching a room full of pupils who can see you, ask you something at the moment they’re confused, and be noticed if something’s wrong.

Most teachers can write the letter home in their sleep. It’s the conversation that keeps them up the night before.

You know the one: the parents’ evening slot, the phone call you’ve been putting off since lunchtime, the five minutes at pick-up you’ve been quietly rehearsing in your head between lessons. Somewhere along the way you decide it’s easier to send a note about “some concerns” and let the written word do the work. It rarely does. A letter can tell a parent that something is wrong. It can’t read the room, adjust when someone goes quiet, or reassure a parent in real time that you’re on their child’s side. Only a conversation can do that — which is exactly why it’s worth getting better at having one, even though it’s uncomfortable.

It’s also worth remembering what’s actually at stake in getting it right. A Department for Education–commissioned review of the evidence on parental engagement (DFE-RR156) found that the effect of parental involvement on a primary-age child’s achievement is bigger than the differences between schools of varying quality — and that holds true across social class and ethnic background. The conversation you’re dreading isn’t a courtesy extra on top of your teaching. For a lot of children, it’s one of the highest-leverage five minutes in their week.

Why this is genuinely hard, not just awkward

It helps to name what’s actually going on when you feel your stomach drop at the thought of the meeting. Two fears tend to be doing most of the work.

The first is straightforward: you don’t want to upset someone who loves this child more than anyone else in the building does. Telling a parent their eight-year-old is behind, or their Year 10 pupil has stopped handing in work, can feel like telling them something is wrong with their parenting, even when that’s nowhere near what you mean.

The second fear is quieter and more personal: that the parent will hear the news as an accusation against you. Why didn’t you flag this sooner? What have you actually been doing about it? Teachers carry a low hum of anxiety about being blamed for a problem they didn’t cause and can’t fully fix alone — a Year 11 pupil’s attendance dropping because of what’s happening at home, a Year 3 child arriving each September already behind. A 2024 review of the evidence on these conversations, published in the School Community Journal, treats this as a genuine professional skill gap rather than a personality trait: teachers are rarely trained in the specific communication techniques that make a hard conversation land well, and most learn by trial and error, in public, with someone else’s child in the room.

That’s the honest starting point. This isn’t about having thicker skin. It’s about a handful of concrete techniques that make the conversation more likely to go well for everyone in it — including you.

Swap “struggling” for what you actually saw

“Struggling” is a word that does no work. It’s vague enough that a parent can politely nod and dismiss it, or catastrophic enough that they leave the meeting convinced their child is failing at everything. Either way, they walk out without the one thing they actually needed: something specific enough to act on.

Compare these two openers.

“Amelia’s really struggling with her reading at the moment.”

“In our last three guided reading sessions, Amelia’s needed the passage read aloud to her before she can answer the literal comprehension questions — last Tuesday she got two out of eight right on her own. She’s not struggling to decode the words; it’s holding on to what they mean once she’s read them.”

The second version gives a parent something to picture. It also, almost by accident, gives them somewhere to put their worry: not “my child is failing,” but “my child needs help holding meaning in mind while decoding” — a specific, nameable, workable problem. This is precisely the territory the Education Endowment Foundation’s guidance report, Working with Parents to Support Children’s Learning, is built around. Its third recommendation is to tailor school communications to encourage positive, two-way dialogue about learning, rather than defaulting to generic updates that parents can’t act on. Vague concern invites vague reassurance back. Specific concern invites a specific plan.

Being able to reach for detail like this in the moment is easier when you’re not relying on memory. Plenty of teachers now use a tracking tool — including the record-keeping built into Learnaroo Hub — to pull up a dated log of a child’s recent work before a conversation, so what you’re describing to a parent is a pattern you can point to, not an impression you’re hoping holds up under questioning.

Why the “sandwich” falls flat — and what to do instead

Most teachers were taught some version of the feedback sandwich: open with something positive, deliver the concern, close with encouragement. The instinct behind it is sound. The execution usually isn’t. Parents have sat through enough of these meetings to recognise the shape of it — and once they clock the pattern, the opening compliment starts to sound like throat-clearing before the real news, which undermines the very thing it was meant to protect.

There’s a decent evidential reason it underperforms, too: people tend to remember what they hear first and last far better than what’s sandwiched in the middle, so parents often walk away recalling the praise and the vague reassurance and letting the actual concern slide past. As Edutopia’s reporting on this puts it, softening the message this way “doesn’t necessarily drive it home.”

A more useful structure, drawn from the same body of practical classroom advice, keeps the honesty but drops the performance. Instead of praise-concern-praise, work through five moves:

Context — when and where you’re seeing this, so it’s clearly bounded (“in maths, specifically during independent work”)
Observation — the specific, factual example, not an interpretation of it (“he puts his hand up but then says ‘never mind’ when I get to him”)
Effect — what this is doing to his learning or to the people around him, stated plainly rather than dramatically
Why it matters — the honest reason this is worth a meeting rather than an email
Input — a genuine question back to the parent, asked early enough that it isn’t just a closing formality

That last point matters more than it looks. The real antidote to a sandwich that feels patronising isn’t cutting the strengths — genuine strengths, specifically described, are still worth naming, because they tell a parent you see their child as more than the problem you’ve called them in about. The antidote is asking the parent something before you’ve finished talking, not just after. “What are you noticing at home when it’s time to do homework?” changes the whole shape of the meeting from a verdict being delivered to a conversation being had.

Where the pupil fits into this

It’s easy to talk about a child as if they’re not eventually going to hear about this conversation — because they will, one way or another. Deciding how and when they’re involved is part of planning the meeting, not an afterthought.

For younger children, that might just mean telling them beforehand, in plain terms, that you’re meeting their parent and roughly what you’ll be talking about — not as a warning, but so they’re not blindsided by a changed mood at home that evening. For older pupils, it often means asking them directly what they think is getting in the way, before the meeting, and being honest with the parent about what their child said. A Year 9 pupil who says “I don’t get why we’re doing it this way, so I stop trying” is giving you something far more useful than a guess ever could, and repeating that back to a parent — with the pupil’s permission — tends to land better than a teacher’s theory about motivation.

This lines up with how the SEND Code of Practice frames the graduated approach used for pupils needing extra support. The assess–plan–do–review cycle is explicit that reviewing progress has to go beyond attainment data alone; it needs to take in wellbeing, engagement and social interaction too, and that means including the child’s own voice in the picture, not just the adults’. Whether or not a pupil is formally on SEN support, the principle holds: the person the meeting is about usually has something worth hearing, even if they’re not in the room for all of it.

When a parent goes quiet, or comes out fighting

Some parents shut down. Some push back hard. Both reactions are, more often than not, about fear rather than hostility — fear that this reflects on them, fear that their child is being written off, fear born of their own difficult experiences of school. Knowing that doesn’t make it comfortable to sit across from, but it changes what you do next.

The instinct when a parent gets defensive is to explain, justify, or produce more evidence — but jumping straight into defending your position or the school’s tends to make things worse, not better, because it reads as dismissing what they’ve just said. The more effective first move is almost always to listen. Active listening here means something specific: reflecting back both what a parent has said and how they seem to be feeling about it, and asking a clarifying question rather than immediately countering. You don’t have to agree with everything they say for this to work — it’s a way of showing you’ve actually taken in their perspective before you respond to it, and that alone tends to lower the temperature.

Language matters too. Research on these conversations has found that framing your own observations as I-statements — “I noticed,” “I’m concerned,” “what I’m seeing” — carries a measurably lower risk of triggering a defensive reaction than statements that sound like accusations, even when the underlying content is identical. “You need to make sure he does his reading” and “I’m noticing he’s coming in without his reading done most days, and I wanted to check in with you about it” describe the same problem. Only one of them invites a parent to defend themselves before you’ve finished the sentence.

If a parent becomes upset rather than defensive, resist the urge to fill the silence. Let them have the reaction. Offer a tissue, a pause, a moment before you carry on — and if the conversation has clearly stopped being productive, it’s entirely reasonable to suggest reconvening once everyone’s had a chance to sit with it, rather than pushing through to a forced, tidy ending that nobody really means.

Put it in writing afterwards

Whatever gets agreed in the room needs to exist somewhere outside it too. A short follow-up — email is usually enough — summarising what was discussed, what’s been agreed, who’s doing what, and when you’ll check back in, does several jobs at once. It gives a parent something to refer back to once the emotion of the meeting has settled and the detail has blurred. It protects you both if there’s any confusion later about what was actually said. And it turns a single conversation into the start of a monitored plan rather than a one-off event that quietly fades.

Be concrete about the review point, not vague about it. “We’ll touch base again” tends to mean nothing gets checked. “I’ll email you again in two weeks with how the extra reading practice is going” gives the plan a pulse. This is also where the EEF’s guidance is worth returning to: its first recommendation is that schools critically review how they work with parents rather than assuming existing habits are working, and its fourth is to offer more sustained, intensive support where a lighter touch clearly isn’t shifting things. A written follow-up is the easiest place to build that review point in, so the next step doesn’t depend on anyone’s memory.

Knowing when it’s not yours to carry alone

Not every concern belongs entirely to you, and recognising that early is a strength, not an admission of failure. The SEND Code of Practice is clear that class and subject teachers hold primary responsibility for a pupil’s progress even once a SENCo or teaching assistant is involved — but that doesn’t mean handling every conversation solo is the right call. Loop in your SENCo when a concern moves from something you’re differentiating for day to day into a pattern that quality-first teaching alone isn’t shifting, when a parent raises the same worry more than once, or when what you’re seeing starts to look like it might sit outside your own expertise — processing difficulties, an emerging anxiety pattern, or a home situation you’re only getting the edges of.

Safeguarding sits in its own category entirely. If anything a child or parent says raises even a flicker of concern about a child’s safety or welfare, that goes straight to your designated safeguarding lead, the same day, following your school’s procedure — not into a parent conversation you’re managing yourself, and not something you sit on to “see how the meeting goes” first. It isn’t your job to investigate a safeguarding concern. It’s your job to notice it and pass it on quickly to someone whose job it is.

Pastoral leads earn their place in this too, particularly when what’s showing up in your lesson — withdrawal, a drop in effort, a sudden change in friendship groups — looks like it might have roots well outside your subject. You don’t need a diagnosis or a tidy explanation before you ask for help. “Something’s changed and I don’t fully understand what” is a perfectly good reason to bring someone else in.

The conversation gets easier, not painless

None of this makes the walk to the meeting room feel comfortable — it probably shouldn’t, given what’s riding on it for the family in front of you. But it does get more manageable with repetition, in the same way any other teaching skill does. Specifics instead of adjectives. A structure that earns the compliments it gives rather than performing them. A real question asked early, not tacked on at the end. Somewhere to send the parent when this needs more than one conversation can hold. Get those in place and the letter stops being the easy option you retreat to, and starts being what it should always have been: the record of a conversation you’d already had, not a substitute for one you were avoiding.

Ask any teacher what “differentiation” means and you get a knowing look before the words even arrive: three worksheets, colour-coded by chilli rating, printed at half past ten on a Sunday night because the plan wasn’t going to write itself. For years that was simply what good practice looked like on a lesson observation form — different tasks for different groups, pitched at whatever each group was assumed to be capable of. Then the guidance changed. The Department for Education, the Education Endowment Foundation (EEF) and Ofsted have all, in their own documents and in their own words, moved away from that model and towards something called “adaptive teaching.” It isn’t a rebrand you can safely ignore. It’s a real change in what’s being asked of you — and, more usefully, it’s less work than the old version, once you stop trying to plan three lessons instead of one.

This is about what actually changed, why the old style of differentiation had a genuine, evidenced downside for lower-attaining pupils, and what adaptive teaching looks like on an ordinary Tuesday with thirty children in front of you and one free period to prepare for them.

The shift from “differentiation” to “adaptive teaching,” and why it happened

Teachers’ Standard 5 has always said the same thing since 2011: teachers must “adapt teaching to respond to the strengths and needs of all pupils.” What’s changed is the detailed guidance sitting underneath that standard. The 2019 Early Career Framework, and the Initial Teacher Training and Early Career Framework that replaced it in 2024, both build out Standard 5 using the specific term “adaptive teaching” — and both define it partly by contrast with what they don’t want to see. The framework is explicit that pupils “are likely to learn at different rates and to require different levels and types of support,” but it pairs that with an equally clear caution: adaptation is “less likely to be valuable” when it causes teachers “to artificially create distinct tasks for different groups of pupils or to set lower expectations for particular pupils.”

The EEF has been the most direct about naming the problem. In a blog explaining the change, the EEF said it was moving away from “differentiation” as a term precisely because, in practice, it had come to mean something narrower and less useful than intended: separate worksheets, separate expectations, sometimes a separate (thinner) curriculum for whichever table was labelled “support.” Adaptive teaching, in the EEF’s framing, keeps the same learning intention for the vast majority of the class and adjusts the route pupils take to get there — through scaffolding, questioning, modelling and grouping — rather than adjusting the destination.

Ofsted’s materials point the same way. Commentary tied to the education inspection framework draws a similar line between teachers who “adapt teaching in a responsive way, for example by providing focused support to pupils who are not making progress,” and the kind of differentiation that “causes teachers to artificially create distinct tasks for different groups of pupils or to set lower expectations for particular pupils.” Put the three together and the message is consistent across the DfE, the EEF and inspection guidance: adapt the support, not the ambition.

None of this means differentiation was always done badly, or that every teacher who ran a three-tier worksheet system was letting pupils down. Plenty of experienced teachers used “differentiated” loosely to mean exactly what “adaptive teaching” now describes — responsive, in-the-moment adjustment. But the language mattered because of what it made easy to do badly at scale, especially under time pressure, which is the next part of this.

Why the old model earned its bad reputation

The practical case against differentiation-by-worksheet isn’t really about workload, even though workload is the reason most of us secretly welcomed the change. It’s about what happens to lower-attaining pupils when a teacher, often with the best intentions, builds them an “easier” version of a task.

Once a class is split into fixed groups and each group gets a different worksheet, something quietly shifts. The teacher’s mental picture of what “the low group” can handle becomes the ceiling for that group, not the floor. Simpler tasks get planned, simpler questions get asked, simpler vocabulary gets used — and, because the group is fixed, that ceiling doesn’t move much lesson to lesson, even as individual children’s understanding does.

This isn’t a hunch. A 2015 review of the evidence on within-class ability grouping, summarised by the Chartered College of Teaching in its research-informed guide to adaptive teaching, found an overall effect size for within-class grouping close to zero — and a distinctly negative effect specifically for lower-achieving pupils. In other words, the pupils the grouping was supposedly designed to help were the ones most likely to be worse off for it. Wider research on setting and streaming has found a similar pattern: pupils placed in lower sets tend to be given a narrower curriculum, lower-level questioning and reduced access to the kind of rich classroom talk that happens when a class is grappling with a genuinely challenging task together.

The mechanism is easy to miss because it never looks like a decision. No teacher sits down and decides to expect less of a child. What happens is smaller and more automatic: a pupil is labelled (by set, by table, by worksheet colour), the label becomes a shorthand for what that pupil is assumed to be capable of, and planning quietly follows the shorthand rather than the child. The EEF’s SEND guidance report makes the same point from a different angle — it warns against approaches that “narrow the curriculum” for pupils who are struggling, because the fix for gaps in understanding is very rarely less content; it’s more support in accessing the same content.

There’s also a confidence cost that’s harder to measure but easy to recognise from the staffroom. Children generally know which table is the “easy” one, whatever euphemism it’s given. Being handed visibly simpler work, lesson after lesson, tells a child something about how they’re seen — and that message can do more long-term damage to their willingness to attempt hard things than any single gap in their maths knowledge.

Scaffolding is not the same thing as simplifying

This is the distinction that makes adaptive teaching workable rather than just aspirational: scaffolding changes the support, not the task. Simplifying changes the task itself — fewer steps, easier numbers, a shorter text, a lower ceiling on what’s being asked. The two get confused constantly because from the front of the room they can look similar; a pupil with a scaffold and a pupil with a simplified task might both be sitting quietly working through something on a printed sheet.

The difference is what happens to the scaffold. A genuine scaffold — a sentence starter, a worked example alongside the question, a set of prompt cards, a partially completed diagram — is temporary by design. It’s there to be removed as the pupil gets more confident, and the underlying task hasn’t changed shape to accommodate it. A simplified task usually isn’t going anywhere; it’s just a smaller version of the real thing, and there’s rarely a built-in route back to the full version.

Practically, this means the planning question changes. Instead of asking “what can this group manage?” — which quietly invites you to write a lower-demand task — the more useful question is “what does every pupil need in order to access this task?” That reframing is also why adaptive teaching is less work over a career, even if it takes a term or two to get comfortable with: you’re building one high-quality task and a bank of supports around it, rather than maintaining three or four parallel versions of every resource you ever use.

Practical adaptive teaching that doesn’t triple your workload

None of the following requires a second lesson plan. Most of it is about how you use the fifty minutes you’ve already got, not extra preparation the night before.

Plan the core task at the top, then scaffold down

Instead of writing a task for the “middle” of the class and then diluting it for lower attainers, plan the version you’d give your most confident pupils first — the one with the highest ceiling, the richest text, the most demanding reasoning. Then decide what temporary support the task needs for pupils who’ll struggle to access it as it stands: a worked example, a glossary of key terms, a partially filled table, sentence stems for the written answer. Everyone works towards the same outcome; some pupils get more scaffolding to get there, and the scaffolding comes off as soon as it’s not needed. This is a single resource with layers, not three separate resources.

Scaffolded and hinge questioning

A hinge question is a quick check, part-way through a lesson, that tells you in real time whether the class has understood the concept well enough to move on — not at the end of the lesson when it’s too late to do anything about it, but while there’s still time to reteach, regroup or push on. Pair this with question stems and prompt cards you can hand to pupils who freeze when cold-called, rather than simplifying the question you ask them. The question stays the same for everyone; the amount of scaffolding around answering it doesn’t.

Flexible, short-term grouping instead of fixed sets

The EEF’s guidance on flexible grouping makes a specific case against permanent ability groups: grouping by need for a particular task, for a single lesson or a single week, and then regrouping differently next time, avoids the labelling problem that fixed sets create. A pupil who needs more support with fractions this week might not need it with data handling next week — fixed groups don’t reflect that, task-based flexible groups do. In practice this can be as simple as grouping by outcome on yesterday’s exit ticket rather than by a term-old baseline test.

Live modelling: I do, we do, you do

Modelling your own thinking out loud — including your mistakes and how you spot them — gives every pupil access to the reasoning behind a task, not just the answer format. Working through an example together as a class before pupils attempt one independently reduces the number of pupils who need a simplified version, because the barrier for many of them was never the difficulty of the task; it was not having seen how an expert approaches it. This single strategy does more to reduce the need for separate “easier” tasks than almost anything else on this list.

Targeted questioning during independent work

Once pupils are working independently, walking the room and directing your attention deliberately — rather than answering whoever puts a hand up first — is where adaptive teaching actually happens in real time. A quick prompt, a redirect to the worked example on the board, a “what did we say about this bit yesterday” to one pupil and a genuinely extending question to another, all within the same five minutes. This is adaptation happening live, matched to what you can see a pupil needs at that moment, rather than decided in advance based on which table they’re sitting at.

SEND is not shorthand for “low attaining”

It’s worth being precise here, because the two get run together constantly and it causes real problems. A pupil with SEND might be working significantly below age-related expectations, at age-related expectations, or well above them. Dyslexia, ADHD, a physical disability, a hearing impairment, autism — none of these tell you anything reliable about a pupil’s attainment level, only about the kind of access barriers they may be dealing with. A highly able pupil with dyspraxia doesn’t need “easier” maths; they need more processing time and a way to record their working that doesn’t depend on handwriting speed. Treating “SEND” and “low attaining” as interchangeable leads to exactly the capping problem described earlier, just aimed at a specific group of pupils who are entitled by law to have their needs met, not their ambitions lowered.

The EEF’s guidance report on high-quality teaching for pupils with SEND is built around what it calls a “five-a-day” principle: five approaches — explicit instruction, cognitive and metacognitive strategies, scaffolding, flexible grouping and effective use of technology — that are good practice for the whole class and particularly important for pupils with SEND. The report’s underlying argument is that high-quality adaptive teaching is the first line of support for pupils with SEND, not a separate curriculum reserved for pupils without it. A related EEF blog on this describes adaptive teaching as a four-step cycle: anticipate the barriers a pupil might face, plan how to address them, use assessment to check what’s actually happening, and then make in-the-moment adjustments based on what you find — which is a different exercise entirely from deciding in September that a named pupil gets the simplified sheet for the rest of the year.

For a teacher or tutor without a background in SEND, the practical takeaway is to separate two questions that often get merged into one: “what does this pupil need to access the task?” and “how hard should the task be?” The first is about scaffolding, and the answer for many pupils with SEND is more processing time, clearer instructions, a quieter working space, a visual timetable, or assistive technology. The second is about ambition, and for the great majority of pupils with SEND the honest answer is: the same as everyone else, unless an EHCP or a specific, evidenced assessment says otherwise. Confusing the two is how well-meaning support turns into a lower ceiling.

What this looks like on an ordinary Tuesday

Take a Year 5 fractions lesson. The old differentiation model might have produced three worksheets: one on halves and quarters for the “support” table, one on equivalent fractions for the middle, and one on adding fractions with different denominators for the “greater depth” table — three separate objectives, three separate sets of marking, and a fairly hard ceiling on what the first group was ever going to be asked to do that half-term.

An adaptive version starts differently. Everyone works towards the same objective — adding fractions with different denominators — because that’s the actual curriculum content for the week. The task itself doesn’t change. What changes is the support around it: a fraction wall for pupils who need a visual model, sentence stems for explaining their reasoning, a worked example left visible on the board for anyone who wants to check their method, and a teacher and TA who spend the independent work time moving between pupils based on what they’re actually seeing, not on a seating plan decided in September. Pupils who finish the reasoning quickly get pushed towards explaining their method to someone else, or a genuinely harder variant — not a reward sticker and the same difficulty of question again. One task, in layers, ends up being less to prepare than three tasks with three separate answer keys, and it keeps every pupil in the room working on the same rich content.

None of this requires new software, a training day, or a rewritten scheme of work — it’s a shift in what question you ask yourself while planning, and in how you use the minutes you’re already spending walking round the room. If you’re looking for ready-made scaffolded resources to build this kind of layered task without starting from scratch each week, Learnaroo Hub’s resource library is worth a look — it’s built around exactly this idea of one strong task with adjustable support, rather than a stack of parallel worksheets to maintain.

Plenty of teachers tutor on the side. Fewer stop to check the practical bits: whether their contract actually allows it, what HMRC expects, whether they need a DBS check as a sole trader, and how to avoid marking someone else’s kitchen table into their tenth working day of the week. None of this is complicated once you’ve been through it, but almost none of it is covered during training or induction. This is the version a colleague would tell you over a coffee, with the sources to back it up.

Check your contract before you check your diary

There’s no general law in the UK stopping an employee from taking a second job. In the absence of a specific clause, you’re free to work elsewhere in your own time. But “in the absence of a specific clause” is doing a lot of work in that sentence, because plenty of contracts do contain one. Employers can restrict outside work where the contract expressly says so, where the second job creates a genuine conflict of interest, where the combined hours breach the 48-hour Working Time Regulations limit, or where it affects your ability to do your main job properly.

For teachers on the School Teachers’ Pay and Conditions Document, directed time covers a maximum of 1,265 hours across 195 days a year, and anything beyond that – including evening and weekend tutoring – sits outside what your employer can direct you to do. That’s helpful context, but it isn’t the same as your employer having no say at all. Academy trusts in particular often write their own additional-employment or outside-interests clauses into contracts, and some require staff to declare secondary paid work or get written consent first. There’s no substitute for actually reading yours, or asking your union rep to read it with you if the wording is vague.

The bit most teachers don’t think to check

If you’re tutoring a child you also teach, examine, or whose coursework or non-exam assessment (NEA) you’ll mark, that’s a separate problem from your employment contract. Awarding bodies run formal conflict-of-interest processes for exactly this situation – AQA’s is a public example – and heads of centre are required to report suspected malpractice involving teachers to the relevant board. Tutoring your own current students for money, especially anywhere near assessed or coursework-based content, is the kind of thing that should go through your exams officer or head of centre before you agree to it, not after.

Telling HMRC: the self-assessment basics

Most teachers tutoring privately are, in HMRC’s eyes, sole traders running a small trading activity alongside employment. You don’t need to set up a company for this. What you do need to know is the trading allowance threshold.

Per gov.uk’s own guidance, you must register for Self Assessment as a sole trader once you earn more than £1,000 in a tax year (6 April to 5 April). Below that, the £1,000 trading allowance generally means you don’t need to register or pay tax on it at all. Cross the threshold and you have two choices on your return: deduct your actual expenses (travel, resources, printing, a proportion of home-office costs, DBS certificate fees, insurance premiums) or claim the flat £1,000 allowance instead – not both. Multiple secondary income sources are added together for the purposes of that £1,000 figure, so a bit of tutoring plus, say, examining or marking work would count against the same limit.

Two things worth flagging. First, HMRC confirmed in March 2025 that the reporting threshold for trading income will rise to £3,000 from the 2027/28 tax year – the £1,000 tax-free allowance itself isn’t changing, but below £3,000 you’ll eventually be spared a full return in favour of simpler reporting. That’s not live yet, so don’t plan around it for the current tax year. Second, the commonly cited registration deadline is 5 October following the end of the tax year in which you started trading – miss it and you risk a penalty even if you owe no tax. Given how often HMRC deadlines and thresholds move, treat these as a starting point and confirm the current figures on gov.uk before you register or file.

What counts as “trading” rather than a one-off favour is a judgement call HMRC makes based on regularity, whether you’re charging a commercial rate, and whether you’re doing it with the intention of making a profit. If you’re taking regular bookings and getting paid for them, you’re trading, even if it’s only a couple of hours a week. Depending on your profits, you may also owe Class 2 or Class 4 National Insurance on top of income tax – the current thresholds change most years, so check them directly on gov.uk when you register rather than relying on a figure from a blog post (including this one).

DBS checks and safeguarding, in practice

It is not a legal requirement for a self-employed private tutor to hold a DBS check. That surprises people. But it comes with two big caveats: agencies and tutoring platforms almost universally require one before they’ll place you, and parents increasingly expect one before letting a stranger into their home with their child. Findtutors’ own research puts the proportion of parents who will only book a DBS-checked tutor at 92%.

The practical route changed recently. Gov.uk guidance live from 21 January 2026 confirms that an eligible self-employed person – including private tutors – can now apply for an Enhanced DBS check, or an Enhanced check with barred list information, through a registered DBS umbrella body, rather than needing an employer or organisation to sponsor the application. Whether you’re eligible for the barred-list version generally depends on how regularly and unsupervised your contact with children is – an umbrella body can confirm exactly where you sit before you apply, so it’s worth asking rather than guessing.

Official safeguarding guidance for parents on out-of-school tuition (published on gov.uk) is written from the family’s side, but it tells you exactly what a sensible parent will ask you for. It advises parents to request evidence of a DBS check if a tutor works alone, to ask whether other adults will be present during home-based sessions, and – specifically for one-to-one arrangements like private tutoring – that they “may wish to supervise sessions.” Build your own practice around that expectation rather than being caught out by it:

Offer, don’t wait to be asked: tell parents up front that you’re happy for them to be in the house, or in the next room, during sessions.
Keep sessions in a shared space – kitchen table, dining room, with the door open – rather than a bedroom or fully closed-off room, whether you’re tutoring at their home or yours.
If a family would rather meet somewhere neutral, a library study room or similar public space works well, particularly for a first session before you know each other.
Don’t offer to collect or drop the child off unless a parent has explicitly asked and it’s agreed in writing beforehand.
Get written consent from a parent or carer before you start, covering who’ll be present, where sessions happen, and how you’ll contact each other.
Have a plain-language answer ready for what you’d do if a child disclosed something concerning to you: you’d listen, not promise confidentiality, write down what was said as soon as possible, and contact local children’s social care or the NSPCC helpline (0808 800 5000) rather than investigating it yourself.

None of this needs to be a formal safeguarding policy document, but writing your version of it down once, before your first booking, means you’re not making decisions on the spot in someone’s hallway.

Insurance: what your school’s cover doesn’t do for you

Your union membership and your school’s insurance cover your work as an employee, in your employed role. They do not extend to a separate self-employed tutoring activity you’re running in the evenings – Edapt’s guidance for private tutors is explicit on this point. Two policies are relevant once you’re tutoring independently:

Professional indemnity insurance covers claims that your teaching, advice, or materials caused a financial or academic loss – for example, a parent alleging you taught the wrong exam board content or that a child missed a grade because of your input. Public liability insurance covers claims for injury or property damage during a session, whether that happens at your home, theirs, or a third venue. Several UK insurers (Hiscox, Simply Business, Markel among them) sell combined tutor policies; Simply Business quotes public liability cover from as little as £5.39 a month, and non-union professional indemnity cover has been advertised from around £185 a year. Costs vary by subject, whether you tutor online or in person, and how much you earn, so treat those as ballpark figures rather than a quote.

If you ever take on another tutor to help with overflow bookings, you’ll also need employers’ liability insurance with a minimum £5 million of cover – that one is a legal requirement, not optional, the moment you employ someone else.

Setting rates and boundaries that protect your evenings

UK tutoring rates cluster around £30–£50 an hour on average, with primary tutoring nearer £29 and A-level nearer £50+, and a noticeable premium in London and other major cities. Those figures come from tutoring-platform pricing surveys rather than a fixed scale, so use them as a sense check, not a rulebook – your subject, exam board specialism, and track record all move the number.

The boundary-setting matters more than the pricing, because this is the part that actually protects your evenings once term starts:

Decide your cancellation policy before you need it – most tutors charge for late cancellations (24–48 hours’ notice is common) rather than deciding case by case, which avoids an awkward negotiation every time.
Keep tutoring communication on a separate number or email if you can manage it, so a parent’s 9pm message about Thursday doesn’t land in the same inbox as tomorrow’s lesson resources.
Put your rate, session length, cancellation terms and payment schedule in writing before the first session – a short email is enough, it doesn’t need to be a contract.
Invoice or request payment on a fixed schedule (weekly or monthly) rather than chasing it after each session.
Revisit your rate at least once a year. Tutors who set a price in their NQT year and never move it are usually the ones quietly resenting the work three years later.

Avoiding burnout on top of a full teaching timetable

The maths that catches people out isn’t the tutoring hours themselves – it’s that they sit on top of planning, marking and reporting you’re already doing unpaid in the evenings. Two hours of tutoring after a full teaching day isn’t two hours of extra work; it’s two hours plus the admin of arranging it, the resource prep specific to that student, and the mental load of a fourth “lesson” after you’d normally have switched off.

A few things that keep this sustainable rather than corrosive: cap the number of regular students you take on and hold that number even when demand is there, protect at least one weekday evening as fully off-limits, and be honest with yourself and your families about exam season, report-writing windows and half-terms – most parents will accept “I’m not taking new bookings until after mocks” far better than a burnt-out cancellation in week two of term. If a chunk of your prep time each week goes on finding or adapting topic-specific resources for a 1:1 session rather than planning the actual teaching, that’s exactly the kind of repeat admin worth offloading somewhere – free resource libraries like the one on Learnaroo Hub are built for that kind of reuse across classroom and one-to-one settings, rather than rebuilding a worksheet from scratch every time.

The honest test of whether it’s working is whether you can still tell the difference, by March, between your teaching job and your side income. If tutoring starts feeling like a second full-time job rather than a chosen extra, that’s the point to scale back the number of students, not push through the term.

Assessment of learning, and assessment for learning

Every teacher has had this moment. You ask the class, “Does everyone get it?” A sea of nods comes back. You move on. Three days later the books come in and it’s obvious a third of the room didn’t get it at all. Nobody lied to you. They didn’t know they didn’t know, or they didn’t want to be the one holding the class up. That gap between what you think has landed and what’s actually landed is the reason assessment for learning exists, and it’s worth being precise about what the term actually means.

Assessment of learning is a judgement: the end-of-topic test, the mock, the GCSE paper itself. It’s a snapshot of what a pupil can currently do, usually reported as a mark, usually arriving after the teaching is finished. It matters for tracking and reporting, but by the time you’re marking it, the teaching that produced those results is already done. You can act on what it tells you for next term. You can’t act on it for the class sitting in front of you today.

Assessment for learning is different in purpose, not necessarily in format. It happens during the teaching, and its only job is to change what happens next, in this lesson or the following one. Paul Black and Dylan Wiliam’s 1998 review for King’s College London, which pulled together evidence from close to 250 studies, is still the reference point most of this thinking traces back to. They found that improving formative assessment was one of the more reliable ways to raise attainment, and one of the few interventions that seemed to help lower-attaining pupils more than anyone else, narrowing the gap rather than widening it.

The practical test is simple: a quick check only counts as assessment for learning if you’re going to act on it before the lesson ends, or before the next one starts. Ask a question, get an answer, and carry on regardless of what that answer was, and you haven’t checked anything. You’ve just talked.

Why hands up gives you the wrong picture

Hands-up questioning feels like it’s checking understanding. Mostly it isn’t. It’s checking who is confident, and quick, enough to want to answer in front of everyone else, which is a much smaller and far more self-selecting group than “the class”.

Black and Wiliam noticed that in most classrooms only a handful of pupils ever answer, and everyone else learns fast that they can leave it to that handful. The quiet ones aren’t necessarily lost. Some know the answer and just don’t fancy the exposure. Some genuinely don’t know. Hands-up questioning lets both groups hide behind the same small set of volunteers, and you can’t tell which is which from the front of the room.

There’s a timing problem too. Watch what actually happens after you ask a question: three or four hands go up almost instantly, a couple more join after a second or two, and if you hold out to around four seconds, roughly half the class will have offered a response. Half. Most teachers, without meaning to, take the first hand or answer their own question within two or three seconds, which isn’t long enough for a pupil to think an answer through rather than just recall it. Black and Wiliam’s advice on this is blunt: target a question at a named individual, then wait at least three seconds before expecting anything back.

None of this means questioning is a bad idea. It means hands-up questioning on its own tells you about a subset of the room and very little about the rest. If you want to know what the whole class actually thinks, you need a method where everyone answers, not just the volunteers.

Hinge questions: the check that makes you decide something

A hinge question is Dylan Wiliam’s term for a question planted at a genuine turning point in a lesson, the moment where what happens next should depend on how pupils respond. The name is the whole idea. The lesson hinges on the answer. If understanding is solid, you carry on. If it isn’t, you loop back before building anything else on a shaky foundation.

What makes a hinge question actually work

A good hinge question has to be quick both ways. Pupils should be able to answer it in a minute or two, and you should be able to read the whole class’s response within about thirty seconds, which rules out anything needing extended writing. It needs to reach every pupil rather than a sample, so it wants a format where everybody commits to something visible at the same moment. And it has to be diagnostic, not just right-or-wrong. A hinge question that only tells you “62% correct” is far less useful than one that also tells you which misconception is doing the damage.

Building the answer options

This is where the planning time actually goes, and it’s the part worth doing properly. Multiple choice suits hinge questions because it forces you to decide the plausible wrong answers in advance, rather than reacting to whatever pupils happen to say on the day. Each wrong option should represent a real misconception, ideally one you’ve genuinely seen pupils make, not a distractor invented to fill a gap. Teaching negative number multiplication, for example, you’d want options built roughly like this:

the answer a pupil gets if they forget the sign rule entirely
the answer they get if they apply the rule to only one of the two numbers
the correct answer
possibly a fourth option covering a common arithmetic slip that has nothing to do with signs at all, so you’re not accidentally teaching pupils to hunt for “the sign trick” option

When the whiteboards go up, a well-built set of distractors tells you not just who is stuck but roughly where and why, which is what actually shapes what you do in the next five minutes.

Mini-whiteboards: the fastest read you’ll get on a room

If hinge questions are the “what to ask”, mini-whiteboards are one of the best ways to run them. Every pupil writes an answer, holds it up on a signal, and for a couple of seconds you get a picture of the whole room’s thinking at once. No one opts out by staying quiet, and no one coasts on somebody else’s raised hand.

The reason whiteboards work is fairly mundane: because everyone has to write something and hold it up, participation sits close to 100%, in a way hands-up questioning never manages. That single design feature is most of the benefit. You’re not getting cleverer questions out of a whiteboard. You’re getting an honest sample instead of a self-selected one.

The routine matters as much as the technique. Most teachers who use whiteboards well settle on something like: write your answer, don’t show your neighbour, hold up on the count of three, no changing your answer once boards are up. Standing at the back of the room to scan, rather than the front, lets you sweep the whole set in one glance instead of just the first couple of rows. Reading twenty-eight boards held in the air genuinely is quicker than marking twenty-eight books, and you get the information while it’s still useful rather than three days later.

The Education Endowment Foundation’s 2018 evaluation of a professional development programme built around Wiliam and Siobhán Leahy’s formative assessment ideas, whiteboard-style checks included, followed roughly 25,000 pupils across 140 secondary schools. It found an average gain equivalent to two months’ additional progress on GCSE Attainment 8, rated as a high-security finding. It’s a modest number rather than a dramatic one, and the trial didn’t find a separate significant effect isolated to English or maths specifically, but two months from a low-cost change in classroom habit, tested at that scale, is a reasonable return for something that costs a stack of whiteboards and a bit of routine-building.

Exit tickets that don’t create a marking backlog

An exit ticket is whatever a pupil answers on the way out of the room, usually in the last three to five minutes, usually a slip of paper or a single question on the board. The idea is old and simple. Where it goes wrong is when teachers turn it into extra marking, which is the surest way to stop using it by half term.

Keep it to one question, and pick a format you can read in a glance rather than one you have to read carefully. A single multiple-choice question, a traffic-light self-rating next to one line of working, or one sentence starting “I’m still not sure about…” all take a pupil under two minutes to complete and take you under two minutes to skim across the whole class. The researcher Robert Marzano set out four broad types of exit prompt worth knowing: a question that checks a specific piece of understanding, one that asks pupils to explain their own thinking, one that asks them to evaluate the lesson itself, and one that invites reflection on what they’d still like to know. You don’t need all four every lesson. Pick whichever matches what you actually need to find out.

The design discipline is the same one that makes hinge questions work: decide the question before the lesson, not during the scramble of the last five minutes, so it tests what you actually taught rather than whatever’s quickest to write on the fly. If putting together fresh checking questions every week is the bit that eats into your planning time, a bank of ready-made quiz and check content, the kind the Learnaroo Hub library provides, is worth having as something to adapt rather than a blank page to start from.

Cold-calling, done as support rather than a trap

Cold-calling means asking a question and then naming the pupil who’ll answer it, rather than waiting for hands. Doug Lemov set it out as a named technique in Teach Like a Champion, and it’s since been picked up and promoted heavily in England by Dylan Wiliam, largely because it solves the same problem as mini-whiteboards from a different angle: it makes participation the default rather than the exception.

The case for it is really about inclusion, not about catching anyone out. With hands-up, the pupils who never volunteer get to opt out of thinking as well as opt out of answering, lesson after lesson, and nobody notices because the lesson keeps moving regardless of who’s actually engaged. Cold-calling removes that option. Everyone has to be ready to answer, which in practice means everyone has to actually engage with the question rather than wait to see if somebody else will.

Whether it feels supportive or feels like a trap comes down entirely to how you run it, and done badly it genuinely is unpleasant to sit through. A few habits make the difference. Give real thinking time before naming anyone, rather than firing a name at a pupil who hasn’t had a chance to consider the question yet. Treat “I’m not sure, but I think…” as a real answer worth building on, not a failure to move past quickly. Come back to the same pupil later, once they’ve heard a couple of other answers, so being called on isn’t a one-shot public test. And keep your own reaction genuinely even, the same tone for a right answer as a wrong one, because pupils clock instantly whether a wrong answer gets treated as useful information or as something to be embarrassed about. Teachers who introduce cold-calling often report that it’s unpopular with almost everyone for the first couple of weeks, including the keen hand-raisers who’ve lost their chance to show off and the quiet pupils who’ve lost the option of staying under the radar. Both groups tend to settle once it’s clear the questioning isn’t a gotcha, just how the class works.

The part most advice skips: what you actually do with what you find out

This is the bit that separates assessment for learning from assessment theatre. Running a hinge question, a whiteboard check, or an exit ticket, and then carrying on with the lesson plan regardless of what it showed, isn’t formative assessment. It’s just a different way of asking the class a question. The value sits in the decision you make immediately afterwards, and there are really only three honest options.

Reteach it now

Reteach now, in this lesson, if the check shows a majority of the class sharing the same misconception or gap. If two-thirds of the whiteboards show the same wrong answer, pushing on to the next part of the topic just builds new content on top of a foundation you already know is cracked. Stop, reteach the specific point differently from how you taught it the first time (repeating the same explanation more slowly rarely fixes a genuine misconception), and check again before moving on. This is close to what the EEF’s 2021 feedback guidance means by its second recommendation, that feedback should be timed appropriately and focused on moving learning forward rather than filed away for later.

Flag it for next lesson

Flag it for next lesson if it’s a minority who are shaky and the rest of the class is solid. Derailing the whole lesson for six pupils out of thirty wastes the other twenty-four pupils’ time, and probably won’t fix the six anyway, since a rushed whole-class reteach delivered under time pressure rarely lands better than the first attempt did. Note who struggled. A seating plan with a quick tick or cross next to each name takes seconds and is far more useful later than a vague memory of “a few people looked unsure.” Build a short retrieval task, a starter, or five minutes of small-group support into the next lesson or the one after.

Move on

Move on if the check shows genuine, near-universal security. This is the option teachers seem to trust least, possibly because it feels like you should always be doing more. But reteaching a concept that’s already landed for the whole class isn’t cautious, it’s a waste of lesson time that could go toward the next thing, and pupils notice when they’re being taught something they already understand. Trust the check. If it says they’ve got it, let them have it and move at the pace the evidence supports.

One more habit worth building in: don’t let a single check make the decision alone if you can help it. A hinge question that half the class gets wrong is a strong signal on its own. A hinge question where three specific pupils get it wrong, and those are the same three who struggled on a whiteboard check two lessons ago, is a stronger one still, because now you know it’s a pattern rather than a bad day. These techniques work best used together over weeks, not as one-off tricks dropped into a single lesson.

Keeping it sustainable

None of this needs new resources or a policy change. A stack of mini-whiteboards, a slip of paper for an exit ticket, and a class list to cold-call from are the whole toolkit. What it costs is planning time up front, mainly in writing the hinge question’s wrong answers properly, and a bit of nerve in the room, mainly with cold-calling in the first few weeks. The Education Endowment Foundation’s Teaching and Learning Toolkit puts the average impact of improving classroom feedback at around six months’ additional pupil progress, among the higher-impact, lower-cost strategies available to a classroom teacher. That’s a reasonable trade for something you can start using in your next lesson, not your next planning cycle.

Every autumn, a new crop of form tutors, NQTs and cover staff gets handed an invigilation rota and a laminated instruction sheet, with barely any explanation of why the rules are what they are. Then a parent emails asking why their child “didn’t get their extra time” in a mock, or a Year 11 pupil turns up to a real exam wearing a smartwatch, and suddenly everyone is looking at you. This piece sets out what access arrangements actually are, how the application process works in most schools, what invigilators are genuinely required to do under JCQ rules, and where things commonly go wrong. It’s written for classroom teachers and tutors, not exams officers, so it stays at the level of “what do I need to know to not cause a problem,” rather than trying to replace the full regulations.

What access arrangements actually are

Access arrangements are adjustments agreed before an exam that let a candidate with a specific need — a learning difficulty, a disability, a temporary injury, a medical condition — show what they actually know without the format of the exam getting in the way. The JCQ is clear about the boundary here: an access arrangement changes how a candidate accesses the assessment, not what is being assessed. A scribe can write down what a candidate dictates, but cannot improve, correct or add to the candidate’s own answer. Extra time gives a candidate more time to process and respond, but doesn’t change the questions they’re answering.

This matters because access arrangements sit alongside, but aren’t identical to, “reasonable adjustments” under the Equality Act 2010. In practice schools tend to use the terms fairly interchangeably, and JCQ guidance treats them as closely related: reasonable adjustments are the legal duty owed to disabled candidates, and access arrangements are largely how that duty gets delivered in an exam setting. The key point for a classroom teacher is simpler than the legal distinction: a pupil doesn’t get extra time or a reader just because a teacher thinks it would help, or because a parent requests it. It has to be agreed through a formal process, with evidence, and recorded before the exam.

How the JCQ application process actually works

Who leads on it

In most secondary schools this sits with the SENCo. JCQ guidance is explicit that the SENCo, or an equivalent named member of staff in a further education setting, must lead the access arrangements and reasonable adjustments process. That doesn’t mean the SENCo does every piece of the work alone — subject teachers are usually asked to provide evidence of a pupil’s “normal way of working” in class, and the exams officer handles the administrative and booking side — but the SENCo owns the process and signs it off. If you’re a subject teacher wondering who decided a pupil gets a reader, the SENCo is your first port of call, not the exams office.

What evidence is needed

Applications go through JCQ’s online system, Access Arrangements Online (AAO). For arrangements linked to a learning difficulty — most commonly extra time — the standard route is a completed Form 8, built around an assessment carried out by a suitably qualified assessor no earlier than Year 9. That assessment typically needs to show a specific pattern of standardised scores in areas like processing speed, reading or writing, alongside evidence from teaching staff that the arrangement reflects the pupil’s normal way of working in lessons and internal assessments — not something introduced for the first time in the exam itself. For arrangements linked to a medical condition, sensory impairment or other complex need, the relevant route is generally Form 9, which needs supporting evidence from an appropriate specialist (for example a medical consultant, CAMHS or an educational psychologist) plus evidence of impact gathered by the centre.

The “normal way of working” requirement is one of the most misunderstood parts of the process by non-SENCo staff. A pupil can’t be given a scribe for their GCSEs if they’ve never used one in a mock exam or in class. This is why SENCos chase subject teachers for evidence throughout Years 10 and 11 (or the equivalent in a sixth form or college) rather than waiting until study leave. If you teach a pupil who struggles and you suspect they might need an arrangement, flagging it early — ideally well before the exam series it would apply to — gives the SENCo time to build a proper evidence file, rather than trying to retrofit one under deadline pressure.

Timing

Applications need to be in place ahead of the exam series they cover, and processing takes time — assessments have to be booked, forms completed correctly, and in some cases applications submitted for approval before results can be relied on for the live exam. Some lower-level arrangements can be approved and recorded at centre level without a full online application (supervised rest breaks are the clearest example — more on that below), but anything involving extra time, a reader or a scribe on non-delegated grounds needs to go through the formal AAO process. Don’t assume an arrangement can be sorted the week before the exam.

The common types of access arrangement

There’s a longer list of possible arrangements than most teachers realise, but a handful come up repeatedly in mainstream schools.

Extra time. The most common arrangement, usually granted as 25% additional time. Higher percentages exist — up to 50% in less common cases, and beyond that only in genuinely exceptional circumstances with strong supporting evidence — but 25% is the default most centres will be dealing with day to day.
A reader. Someone who reads the question paper (and, depending on the subject rules, parts of the candidate’s own writing back to them) for a candidate whose difficulty is with decoding text, not with the subject content. Readers aren’t available where the exam is specifically testing reading ability itself, since that would remove the thing being assessed.
A scribe. Someone who writes down exactly what the candidate dictates, without prompting, rephrasing or correcting. This is a heavily regulated arrangement precisely because it’s easy to get wrong: a scribe adding polish or structure the candidate didn’t provide is malpractice, not support.
Separate invigilation. Some candidates sit their exam away from the main hall — a smaller room, sometimes alone or in a small group — usually because of anxiety, a medical need, or because their other arrangements (a reader or scribe working aloud, for instance) would be disruptive to other candidates. It’s still a formal, supervised exam under full JCQ conditions; it isn’t a softer version of the exam, just a different room.
Supervised rest breaks. Breaks during the exam, usually for candidates with a medical condition, chronic pain, fatigue or significant anxiety, where the clock stops (or the candidate’s time is otherwise protected) while they step away and are supervised. Unlike extra time or a scribe, this one doesn’t require a separate online application — it’s agreed and documented at centre level via the same Form 8/9 evidence process, and it still has to reflect the pupil’s normal way of working, not be introduced on the day.

Beyond these, schools also use things like word processors for candidates whose handwriting is a barrier, coloured overlays or modified/enlarged papers for visual difficulties, prompters for pupils who lose focus, and bilingual dictionaries for candidates who meet the specific JCQ criteria for English as an additional language. All of them follow the same underlying principle: they support access, they don’t inflate the mark.

What invigilators are actually required to do

This is where a lot of school-level training gets vague, so it’s worth being concrete. JCQ publishes a specific Checklist for Invigilators alongside its main Instructions for Conducting Examinations, and every invigilator is meant to be trained against it. Broken down by phase, the core duties are:

Setting up the room

Before candidates arrive, the invigilator checks that any charts or displays that could help with the subject have been cleared from the walls, that a clock all candidates can see is visible, and that a board or display shows the centre number, subject, paper number, and the actual start and finish times. They need access to the current year’s Instructions for Conducting Examinations (electronic or paper copy), any subject-specific instructions, and a seating plan — and their own phone needs to be on silent, for emergency use only.

Identifying candidates

The invigilator has to know the identity of every candidate in the room. For private candidates or anyone sitting the exam somewhere other than their usual centre, that means actually checking documentary evidence that the person in the seat is the person who was entered for the exam — not just trusting a name on a list.

Before the exam starts

Invigilators check the front of the question paper for what materials are actually authorised for that specific paper (calculators and dictionaries vary by subject), warn candidates they must hand over anything unauthorised, and are explicit about what counts: earphones or earbuds, mobile phones, MP3/4 players, smart glasses, tablets, watches and any other smart device. Candidates are told to check the paper details match what they expect, fill in their details in black ink, and not to open the paper until told. Then, and only then, they’re told when to start and how long they have.

During the exam

The attendance register has to be completed accurately, and there are specific procedures for candidates who arrive late. Invigilators are required to stay vigilant throughout to prevent cheating and distraction, and critically, they cannot give candidates any information about suspected mistakes on the paper (unless an official erratum notice has been issued) or about how to answer specific questions — however tempting it is to nudge a struggling pupil in the right direction. Question papers can’t leave the room during the exam, any candidate leaving temporarily needs to be accompanied by an appropriate member of staff, and any incident has to be recorded, not just remembered.

After the exam

Candidates are reminded to check their scripts are complete and clearly marked, and all scripts, papers and other material are collected before anyone leaves the room. Scripts get ordered against the attendance register and stored securely before being sent on.

Where access arrangements fit in

Invigilators are specifically expected to check with the exams officer in advance which candidates in the room have been granted arrangements, understand exactly what each arrangement involves and what materials that candidate is entitled to use — a bilingual dictionary, a coloured overlay, a modified paper — and make sure those candidates are correctly marked on the seating plan. In other words, an invigilator who doesn’t know a candidate has 25% extra time until that candidate is still writing after everyone else has stopped has already failed part of the job.

Common mistakes that put results at risk

JCQ distinguishes between malpractice (a deliberate or negligent breach of the rules, by a candidate or a member of staff) and maladministration (an unintentional procedural failure), but from a school’s point of view both categories can put results at risk, and both have to be reported. Heads of centre are required to notify the relevant awarding body immediately of any suspected or actual incident, whether it involves a candidate, a teacher, an invigilator or other staff — it isn’t something a department can quietly deal with internally.

The mistakes that come up repeatedly are rarely dramatic. They’re usually one of these:

Unauthorised devices. Smartwatches and earbuds are the recurring problem, not phones — pupils are generally used to handing phones in, but forget or don’t realise a smartwatch counts, or that AirPods left in a blazer pocket are a problem even switched off.
Untrained or under-briefed invigilators. If invigilators haven’t been trained against the current year’s checklist, or supply/cover staff are dropped into an exam room without a proper briefing, that’s a compliance failure on the centre, not the invigilator.
Giving candidates help with the paper. Rephrasing a question, confirming an answer’s on the right track, or commenting on the exam content — even with good intentions — is not permitted, and it’s one of the more common ways a well-meaning member of staff accidentally commits malpractice.
Access arrangements not properly recorded or communicated. A candidate getting extra time informally, without it going through the proper application and being reflected in the room’s paperwork and seating plan, isn’t a kindness — it’s an irregularity that can affect that candidate’s result and, in some cases, the wider exam’s integrity.
Poor room administration. No visible clock, missing start/finish times on display, an inaccurate attendance register, or a question paper leaving the room mid-exam are all the kind of “small” administrative slips that JCQ treats seriously, because they undermine the fairness of the exam for everyone sitting it, not just one candidate.
Discussing content afterwards. Candidates and staff talking about exam content once a paper has finished, while other candidates (in a different time zone, a later sitting, or with extra time still running) haven’t yet finished, is a well-known source of malpractice investigations.

None of these need bad intent to cause a real problem. A supply teacher who hasn’t seen the current checklist, or a well-meaning invigilator who answers “is this the right approach?” from an anxious Year 11, can trigger an investigation just as easily as deliberate cheating can.

Who to ask when you’re not sure

If you’re a subject teacher or tutor and something feels uncertain, there are two people in your school who should always know the answer, or know who does:

Your exams officer is the person who runs the administrative and logistical side of exams: entries, room bookings, the seating plan, invigilator rotas and briefings, and liaison with the awarding bodies. If a question is about process, timing, room logistics, or “is this candidate down for extra time,” start here.
Your SENCo owns the access arrangements process itself: whether a pupil qualifies, what evidence exists, and what exactly an arrangement entitles a candidate to. If a question is about whether a pupil should have an arrangement, or what a specific arrangement actually means in practice, start here.

If you’re ever handed an invigilation slot and haven’t been briefed on which candidates in that room have arrangements, that’s a legitimate thing to ask about before the exam starts, not something to guess at once you’re in the room.

Outside the exam room itself, giving pupils — especially those with an identified access arrangement — real practice under timed, exam-style conditions well before the actual sitting is one of the more useful things a subject teacher can do; it’s also part of what “normal way of working” evidence is built on. If you’re looking for structured practice material to use for that, Learnaroo Hub’s exam-prep resources are built with that kind of timed, subject-aligned practice in mind.

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