Tag: Ofsted & Inspection

Every school has a version of the same scene. A TA sits beside the same child, in the same seat, for every lesson, every day, term after term. It looks like support. Ofsted inspectors used to nod approvingly at it. Parents often ask for it by name. And for years, most of us assumed it was simply good practice – more adult attention for the pupil who needs it most has to be a good thing.

The evidence says otherwise, and it’s worth taking seriously because it comes from an unusually solid place. The Education Endowment Foundation’s guidance report Making Best Use of Teaching Assistants is built on a systematic review of the research base on TA deployment – not opinion, not a training company’s sales pitch, but a synthesis of what actually happens to pupils’ outcomes under different models of support. Its conclusion is blunt: the way most schools have drifted into deploying TAs is quietly working against the pupils it’s meant to help. The fix isn’t more training days on “TA skills” in the abstract. It’s a handful of specific, practical changes to how you brief, position and work alongside the TA in your room. This is what those changes look like.

What the evidence actually found

The EEF’s language for the default pattern is the “Velcro” model – a TA effectively stuck to one pupil or one small group, for extended periods, lesson after lesson. It happens for good reasons. A child is struggling, an adult is available, and putting the two together feels like the responsible thing to do. But the report traces what that pattern does over time: it quietly separates the pupil from the classroom teacher, from the pace and content of whole-class teaching, and often from their peer group as well. The pupils who most need expert teaching end up getting the least of it, mediated instead through an adult who is warm and well-intentioned but, in most cases, not trained as a teacher.

The report’s first recommendation states this as plainly as guidance reports ever do: TAs should not be used as an informal teaching resource for low-attaining pupils. The principle underneath it is one worth pinning above your desk – pupils who struggle most should get at least as much time with the teacher as everyone else in the room, not less. If a TA has a direct instructional role, the expectation is that they add value to what the teacher is doing, not quietly substitute for it.

None of this is an argument against TAs. The same evidence base is just as clear that well-deployed TAs move the needle. Structured, short, well-resourced interventions delivered by trained TAs are associated with roughly three to four additional months of progress on average – five months in primary, slightly less in secondary, and a little lower for primary maths specifically. But that figure comes with a condition attached, and it’s the condition most schools skip: those gains only show up when TAs work in structured settings with proper training and support. Put a TA into an informal, unsupported instructional role and the same evidence shows the effect can turn negative. The tool isn’t the problem. How you deploy it is.

Briefing that takes five minutes, not fifty

Ask most TAs what they find most frustrating and you’ll hear some version of the same answer: they walk into lessons not knowing what’s actually being taught, what the class already covered last week, or what “success” looks like for the pupils they’re about to support. They improvise. Sometimes the improvising is excellent. Often it means a TA quietly reteaching a method the class moved on from, or giving help that undercuts what you’re trying to achieve.

The EEF guidance is specific about what a TA needs to know before a lesson starts, and it’s a shorter list than you’d think:

the concepts, facts or information being taught
the skills pupils are meant to learn, apply, practise or extend
the intended learning outcomes – what “getting it” looks like
what feedback you want them to give, and in what form

None of that needs a formal meeting. Most schools that do this well have simply found small, protected pockets of time rather than waiting for one that never appears: a TA arriving fifteen minutes before the bell, a slice of PPA time spent together rather than apart, five minutes at the end of assembly, or a plan left on the TA’s desk the day before with the outcomes and the “watch out for” pupils flagged. What matters is that it happens consistently, not that it’s elaborate. A TA who knows the intended outcome for a lesson can adapt on the fly when a pupil goes off-script. A TA who’s guessing can only ever follow, and following usually means doing the task for the child rather than teaching them to do it themselves.

Building independence, not dependency

This is the part of the guidance that changes classroom practice the most once teachers actually see it in action, because it runs against instinct. The instinct, when a child is stuck, is to help. The evidence says the specific shape of that help is what determines whether it works.

TAs who get the best outcomes are trained to give the least amount of help first, not the most. That means waiting – genuinely waiting, past the point that feels comfortable – before stepping in, so the pupil has a real chance to attempt the next step alone. It means prompting rather than telling: “what do you notice about the first sentence?” rather than reading it for them, “what’s the first thing you need to work out?” rather than working it out and reporting the answer. It means resisting the pull toward task completion. A page of finished, correct work that the pupil didn’t really do themselves feels productive in the moment and is close to worthless six weeks later, because the pupil hasn’t built the skill of doing it unsupported.

Talk quality is the mechanism the research keeps coming back to. A TA who narrates, corrects and fills silences is, without meaning to, training a pupil to wait for the adult rather than think for themselves. A TA who asks a genuine question and then holds the silence is teaching the opposite lesson. It’s a harder skill than it sounds, and it’s one worth explicitly naming and practising with your TA rather than assuming it’ll happen on its own. “Give them the least help that gets them moving” is a good one-line brief to leave on a desk.

Why permanently parking a TA with the same pupils stops working

The Velcro pattern doesn’t just weaken teaching contact. It has quieter costs that build up over a term. Pupils who always have an adult beside them stop being expected to raise a hand, ask a peer, or try before asking – because they’ve learned, correctly, that help is always one seat away. Other pupils notice which children get the permanent adult, and that visibility can do real damage to how a child sees themselves in the room, particularly by Year 5 or 6 and well into secondary. And practically, a TA fixed to one pair of pupils for the whole day has no capacity to respond to whoever actually needs support in a given lesson, which is rarely the same two children every time.

Rotating support instead doesn’t mean abandoning pupils with the greatest need. It means designing deployment around the lesson rather than around a name on a list. In practice that looks like a TA circulating the room rather than parked at one table, dipping in for focused two-minute check-ins with different pupils across a session, taking a different small group for the guided part of each lesson depending on that week’s assessment, or team-teaching a starter so that support isn’t visibly tied to one child at all. Some schools rotate which pupils get TA-led small-group input across the week on a simple timetable, so the same two or three children aren’t always the ones being pulled aside. It takes more planning up front than leaving the arrangement on autopilot. It also means a pupil who’s had a good run of independent work for a fortnight can be given room to keep going, instead of an adult continuing to sit with them out of habit.

What a TA should – and shouldn’t – be doing while you teach the whole class

Whole-class input is where the Velcro habit is most visible and most easily fixed, because it’s largely about positioning and role clarity rather than anything requiring extra training.

What tends not to work: a TA sitting beside one pupil for the entire input, quietly repeating or translating every sentence you say in real time, which trains that pupil to tune out the teacher and tune into the TA instead. Equally unhelpful is a TA who becomes the de facto behaviour manager for a single child, stepping in at the first fidget, because it removes your ability to address behaviour as part of normal classroom routine and singles the pupil out to the rest of the room. And a TA who spends whole-class time doing paperwork, photocopying, or prepping the next activity because “the input doesn’t need me” is a wasted resource – there’s almost always a more useful five minutes available.

What works better: a TA who scans the room during input, picking up the two or three pupils anywhere who look lost rather than fixing on one seat. A TA using a whiteboard or visualiser to model note-taking or key vocabulary alongside you, so support is built into the lesson rather than bolted onto one child. A TA who notes misconceptions during independent work and feeds them back to you at the end, rather than fixing them silently one pupil at a time, so the pattern actually reaches your planning. A TA who moves physically – near the back for input, near pupils who need proximity during independent work, out of the way when a pupil clearly doesn’t need anyone hovering. None of this requires the TA to know less about the lesson. It requires the opposite: the briefing described above is what makes this kind of flexible, room-wide support possible in the first place.

Structured interventions: the other half of the job

Everyday classroom support is one half of what the evidence covers. The other is what happens when a TA takes a pupil or small group out for a dedicated intervention, and here the guidance is unusually precise about what separates an intervention that works from one that doesn’t.

Effective interventions share a shape: sessions are short (often 20–50 minutes), delivered frequently (three to five times a week), and sustained over a defined block (eight to twenty weeks) rather than run indefinitely. TAs delivering them have had real training in that specific programme, not a general TA induction. The intervention has structured materials and a clear plan that the TA follows closely rather than adapting on instinct, and it’s targeted using assessment data so the right pupils are getting it, not just the pupils who happen to be free at that time. Crucially, the report is explicit that interventions are too often run in isolation from classroom teaching, with pupils left to work out the connection themselves. They usually can’t. Someone – teacher or TA – has to make the link between what happened in the intervention room and what’s happening back in class, or the extra time is largely wasted.

If you’re running or overseeing interventions, that’s a reasonable checklist to hold any programme against, whether it’s a scripted commercial scheme or something built in-house. And if a pupil is picking up support from more than one adult across the week – a TA-led intervention, in-class support, maybe a homework club – it helps enormously if everyone involved can see the same plan for what that pupil is working on, rather than each adult reconstructing it from memory. Tools like Learnaroo Hub’s resource-assignment features exist for exactly that kind of coordination, so a teacher and TA are working from the same page for a pupil rather than two different ones.

The working relationship underneath all of it

None of the above holds up without a decent working relationship, and it’s worth being honest that this is often the part schools invest in least. A TA who is treated purely as an extra pair of hands – told what to do at the classroom door with no context and no chance to feed anything back – will, quite reasonably, default to the safest possible interpretation of their role: sit with the child, keep them quiet, keep them working. That’s not a TA problem. It’s what happens when someone is given responsibility without information or voice.

TAs typically spend more one-to-one time with individual pupils than the class teacher does, and that means they often notice things first: a pupil who’s started struggling with reading fluency, a friendship breaking down, a home situation showing up in behaviour. A working relationship built on genuine two-way communication treats that as useful information, not as the TA overstepping. In practice that means asking rather than only telling, taking two minutes at the end of a session to hear what the TA noticed, and being willing to adjust a plan because a TA flagged something that wasn’t obvious from the front of the room. It also means being upfront when something a TA is doing isn’t working, in the same collegial way you’d want feedback yourself – specific and kind, not left to fester.

Mutual respect here isn’t a soft add-on to the evidence above. It’s the condition that makes the evidence usable. A brief only works if the TA trusts it’s worth following. Independence-building only works if the TA believes you’ll back them when a parent asks why their child isn’t getting one-to-one help every lesson. Rotation only works if the TA isn’t quietly worried that spreading their attention looks like they’re doing less. All of that comes from being treated as a professional partner in the classroom, not a supervised extra.

Where to start on Monday

You don’t need a whole-school policy rewrite to change how this works in your own room. Pick one thing. Start briefing your TA on the four “need to knows” before Monday’s lessons, even if it’s a scribbled note rather than a meeting. Watch where your TA sits during your next whole-class input, and move them if they’re parked beside the same pupil out of habit rather than need. Ask your TA, this week, what they’ve noticed about a pupil that you haven’t – and actually use the answer. The EEF’s evidence is consistent on one point above all the others: TAs make a real difference to outcomes when they’re deployed with the same intentionality as any other teaching decision, and very little difference, or a negative one, when they’re not. That’s a decision teachers get to make every single lesson, not once a year in a staff meeting.

Signing the DfE’s Education Staff Wellbeing Charter takes about ten minutes online. Fixing the thing that’s actually breaking your staff room takes rather longer, and it isn’t the thing most wellbeing initiatives target. Every head who has ordered pizza for an INSET afternoon or handed out a “wellbeing day” knows the uncomfortable truth by the following Monday: the goodwill lasts about as long as the leftovers. The workload that caused the exhaustion in the first place hasn’t moved an inch.

That isn’t a reason to give up on staff wellbeing as a leadership priority. It’s a reason to be honest about what actually shifts it. The evidence base on this is now large enough, and specific enough, that no head needs to guess. The Charter tells you what the sector has formally agreed to aim for. Education Support’s Teacher Wellbeing Index tells you, in uncomfortable detail, how far short current practice falls. And the gap between the two points fairly directly at what’s worth doing with a limited budget and a full timetable of your own.

What the Charter actually commits you to

The Education Staff Wellbeing Charter has been open for schools and colleges to sign since November 2021. It’s voluntary, there’s no deadline, and it costs nothing to join beyond the commitment itself. Signing places your school inside a shared framework of five principles and eleven commitments split between the DfE, Ofsted and the institutions that sign up.

The organisational commitments a school takes on when it signs are more concrete than most heads expect. You are agreeing to:

Prioritise staff mental health and embed it into everyday working life, not treat it as a separate initiative
Give staff a genuine voice in decision-making, through structures such as committees or working groups rather than one-off surveys
Drive down unnecessary workload, with the DfE pointing schools toward its workload reduction toolkit as one resource
Champion and enable flexible working, with appraisal and workload reviews tailored to individual roles and circumstances
Build a positive behaviour culture, including recognising good practice among staff
Equip line managers with the tools and training to support their teams’ wellbeing, not just their performance
Set out a clear communications policy so expectations around contact hours and response times are explicit
Support staff career development and progression
Write a specific sub-strategy for protecting the wellbeing of senior leaders, not only classroom staff
Measure staff wellbeing and hold the school accountable for what that measurement shows

That last commitment matters more than it might look. A school that signs the Charter is agreeing, on paper, to actually check whether any of this is working and report on it. Ofsted has also said staff wellbeing is taken into account as part of inspection, which gives the Charter more institutional weight than a typical voluntary pledge.

Where the Charter is more honestly assessed is in its uptake and its teeth. Parliamentary data from January 2023 put the number of schools signed up at roughly 2,350, close to one in ten eligible state schools. By 2025 the DfE was citing more than 4,100 signatories, so the trajectory is upward, but a majority of schools still haven’t joined more than three years after launch. Sarah Hannafin of school leaders’ union NAHT put the underlying issue plainly when the low take-up figures came out: signing “did not bring any extra resources,” and the sector needed something that went “way beyond a simple charter” toward “long-term culture change.” Wellbeing coach Patrick Ottley-O’Connor was blunter still, describing it as a “tick-box exercise” and arguing the DfE “could have provided something more tangible and with accountability.”

None of that is an argument against signing. It’s a reason not to mistake signing for finishing. The Charter is a statement of direction and a checklist of commitments a governing body can hold you to. It is not, on its own, a workload reduction plan, a staffing model, or a budget. Those still have to come from you.

What the Wellbeing Index is actually telling us

Education Support has run the Teacher Wellbeing Index since 2019, and the 2025 edition, published in November, records the lowest overall wellbeing score since the survey began. The headline numbers are stark enough to need no dramatising:

78% of education staff report feeling stressed because of their work
84% of senior leaders specifically report high stress levels — leadership is not a wellbeing-neutral escape from the classroom
71% describe their workload as unmanageable
45% regularly work at least nine additional hours a week beyond their contract
Just 3% of staff manage to keep their work within contracted hours
More than a third have experienced a mental health issue in the past academic year

Teachers now score noticeably below the general UK adult population on wellbeing, life satisfaction and a sense their work is worthwhile, and higher on anxiety. That gap has widened, not narrowed, since the pandemic years when wellbeing was a constant talking point in every staffroom and every trust newsletter.

The Index also captures something school leaders will recognise but rarely see quantified: staff are absorbing responsibilities well outside their job description, and it’s affecting them measurably. 70% of staff are providing some form of emotional regulation support to pupils on a weekly basis, a 31% increase on pre-pandemic levels. 30% are providing food to pupils out of their own resources, and 24% are buying school supplies. Nearly half, 49%, say these additional, unfunded responsibilities are having a negative effect on their own mental health.

Put those two sets of findings together and the picture is unambiguous. Workload is consistently the dominant driver of poor wellbeing across the sector, year on year, and it is compounded rather than caused by the pastoral and welfare gaps schools are quietly filling because no one else will. A single wellbeing day addresses neither.

Why the gesture doesn’t reach the cause

This is the part of the conversation school leaders sometimes find uncomfortable, because a wellbeing day, a hamper, or a mental health first aider are all genuinely well-intentioned, and none of them are wrong to have. The problem is what they’re being asked to substitute for. An employee assistance programme can point a struggling member of staff toward support. It cannot reduce the number of hours that member of staff spends marking, planning or filling in data returns. A mental health first aider can have a good conversation at 4pm. They cannot make the 6pm marking pile smaller.

The clearest evidence for where the real pressure sits goes back further than this year’s Index. A DfE-commissioned workload review group looked specifically at marking practice in 2016 and found that the sheer depth, frequency and “obsessive” nature of marking expected in many schools was actively damaging teachers’ wellbeing and, ironically, their capacity to plan and deliver good lessons in the first place. Marking has stayed one of the most consistently cited workload drivers in every subsequent piece of research, including this year’s Index findings on hours worked beyond contract. A policy that asks for triple-marked books with a written dialogue in three colours is not offset by a biscuit tin in the staffroom.

The same logic applies to flexible working. The DfE published a flexible working toolkit for schools as part of its workload reduction push, and by school leaders’ own reporting, take-up has been thin: coverage of the DfE’s Workload Reduction Taskforce found only a small minority of senior leaders who’d looked at the toolkit rated it genuinely useful in practice. A document sitting on a shared drive is not the same as a school that actually says yes to a compressed-hours or part-time request and rearranges the timetable to make it work.

To be fair to the DfE, some genuinely structural moves have landed alongside the softer initiatives. Performance-related pay was removed from the standard teacher pay framework for the 2024-25 academic year and replaced with a less bureaucratic approach to managing performance, which is exactly the kind of change that reduces paperwork rather than just acknowledging that paperwork is a problem. That’s a useful marker of the distinction this article is drawing: gestures make people feel noticed for an afternoon; structural changes remove hours from someone’s week, permanently, every week.

The levers that actually move the needle

None of what follows is expensive. Most of it is a governance and scheduling decision rather than a budget line, which is precisely why it’s more defensible to a finance committee than a wellbeing away-day would be.

Protect PPA in practice, not just on paper

Every teacher is entitled to at least 10% protected planning, preparation and assessment time by statute. The question worth auditing in your school isn’t whether PPA appears on the timetable, it’s whether it survives contact with cover shortages, last-minute meetings and “just this once” requests. If PPA is the first thing that gets cancelled when a supply teacher doesn’t show, it isn’t protected, it’s provisional. Track how often it’s actually taken over a half-term and you’ll usually find your answer.

Write a marking policy staff believe, then enforce the ceiling not just the floor

Following the 2016 workload review’s findings, a defensible marking policy sets out the minimum useful feedback, not the maximum performable one. Whole-class feedback, live marking during lessons, and verbal feedback logged briefly rather than written out in full are all recognised, evidence-backed ways to give pupils what they need without the multi-hour books-in-a-bag ritual every evening. The test isn’t whether the policy sounds rigorous in an Ofsted-facing document. It’s whether a Year 9 teacher with 180 exercise books can actually comply with it and leave school by 6pm.

Run meeting-light weeks deliberately, not accidentally

A fixed cap, one full staff meeting a fortnight rather than one a week, with everything else pushed to email or a shared document, gives staff back real evening hours without costing the school anything. The Charter’s commitment to “drive down unnecessary workload” is meant to be interpreted this broadly. Audit what every recurring meeting on your calendar is actually for, and be willing to cancel the ones that exist because they always have, not because they change anything.

Do a genuine workload audit, and publish what you found

Not an anonymous survey that vanishes into an SLT inbox. Ask staff, specifically, what task ate the most unpaid time this half-term, and change the top three answers before you ask the question again. The Charter’s accountability commitment, to measure wellbeing and act on it, only means something if staff can see the loop close.

Make flexible working a real conversation, not a policy document

A part-time timetable that genuinely reduces someone’s load, rather than compressing the same workload into fewer days, is one of the few interventions with a direct line to retention. If a request comes in, the test of whether your school takes flexible working seriously is whether the answer involves rearranging the timetable, not just approving the principle.

Write the leadership sub-strategy the Charter actually asks for

84% of senior leaders reporting high stress is not a footnote. Most wellbeing policies are written for classroom staff and assume the head, deputies and heads of department will absorb whatever’s left over. The Charter specifically commits signatory schools to a sub-strategy protecting leaders’ own wellbeing. Very few schools have one in writing. Yours can.

Where a resource bank fits, honestly

Planning and resource creation from scratch is one of the quieter workload drains that rarely makes it onto a wellbeing action plan, because it doesn’t look like overwork the way a stack of exercise books does. It’s evenings and weekends spent building slides, worksheets and schemes of work that a colleague two schools away built last term and would happily never have to build again. A ready-made, curriculum-aligned resource bank, Learnaroo Hub’s library is one example, won’t fix an unmanageable marking policy or a meeting-heavy calendar on its own. But cutting the hours staff spend rebuilding resources that already exist is a genuine structural saving, not a gesture, and it sits alongside protected PPA and a sane marking policy as one lever among several rather than a substitute for any of them.

What to actually do this term

If budget and time are both tight, and they always are, this is a realistic starting order rather than a wish list:

Sign the Charter if you haven’t, but treat it as a checklist to be audited against, not a plan you’ve now completed
Audit PPA take-up over the last half-term against what’s timetabled, and fix the gap before adding anything new
Ask every department to name the single task eating the most unpaid time, and act on the honest answer
Set a hard cap on staff meetings and cancel the recurring ones that exist out of habit
Write down, formally, how your school protects leadership wellbeing specifically, not just staff wellbeing in general
Check your marking policy against what a teacher with a full timetable can actually deliver by 6pm, not what reads well in a self-evaluation document

Staff wellbeing in schools has been measured and talked about for years now without the underlying numbers moving in the right direction, and the 2025 Index is the clearest evidence yet that gestures alone have plateaued. The Charter gives you the shared language and the accountability commitment. The structural changes, protected time, a workable marking policy, a lighter meeting load, and flexible working that’s actually flexible, are what convert that language into fewer nine-hour weeks. Both matter. Only one of them is free to sign and hard to deliver.

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.

Every headteacher who has sat through a September census knows the feeling: counting heads against the published admission number and doing the funding maths in your head before the local authority has even confirmed the figures. For a growing number of primary schools in England, that maths has got harder every year for the best part of a decade. This isn’t a marketing problem you can design your way out of with a nicer prospectus. But how a school talks about itself, and how honestly it does that, has become one of the few levers a leadership team can actually pull.

The pressure is real, and it’s not evenly spread

The numbers are unambiguous. The National Audit Office reported in April 2026 that demand for primary places fell by 3% nationally between 2018/19 and 2024/25, with a further 7% decline projected by 2030. The proportion of unfilled primary places rose from 10% to 14% over that period. On current DfE projections, a further reduction of around 56,300 primary pupils is expected by 2027 alone, which the NAO estimates could mean roughly £288 million less in per-pupil funding flowing to primary schools nationally.

Sector reporting has put a sharper human edge on the same trend: primary pupil numbers fell by well over 200,000 between 2018/19 and 2025/26, with schools in disadvantaged areas losing pupils fastest, according to analysis reported by Headteacher Update. London has been hit hardest and earliest, with the Education Policy Institute and London Councils both documenting sharp falls in primary rolls across the capital linked to birth rate decline and out-migration. But the NAO is also clear that this isn’t uniform: some local authorities and specific catchments are still seeing rising demand, even inside areas that are declining overall. Neighbouring schools two miles apart can be living through opposite realities. This bulge of falling numbers is also not a primary-only story for long — the same cohort will move through secondary admissions within the next several years, so what your school does now about honest, sustainable marketing is worth getting right before the pressure shifts up a phase.

None of this is a reason to panic-market. It’s a reason to be clear-eyed about why families are choosing where they choose, and to make sure your school’s published admission number, your budget planning and your marketing all tell the same honest story rather than three different ones.

What the Admissions Code actually lets you do

It’s worth restating something that gets lost when marketing pressure rises: admission arrangements and marketing are not the same thing, but they sit inside the same legal frame, and the frame is not optional. The statutory School Admissions Code (2021), published by the DfE on 13 July 2021 and in force since 1 September 2021, requires that admission arrangements be “fair, clear and objective.” That principle has real teeth for anything a school says or does that touches who gets a place.

A few boundaries matter directly for marketing and open events:

You cannot use interviews, taster days or open events as a filter. The Code prohibits admission authorities from interviewing children or parents as part of deciding who gets a place, except for certain faith school and boarding arrangements operating within specific rules. An open day can help a family decide if your school is right for them; it cannot become an informal audition that shapes your intake.
Oversubscription criteria have to be published, and they have to be the whole story. Where a school is oversubscribed, places are allocated against criteria set out in the determined admission arrangements, not against anything communicated informally at an open day or in a glossy leaflet. If your marketing implies a route into the school that isn’t in your published criteria, you are creating an expectation the Code doesn’t allow you to honour.
Fair Access Protocols exist for the hardest-to-place children. Local authorities operate protocols, agreed with schools, for placing vulnerable and hard-to-place children in-year, outside the normal admissions round, when a place cannot otherwise be secured. Schools are expected to take their fair share. This sits awkwardly with any marketing narrative built purely around selectivity or exclusivity.
Financial contributions cannot be a condition of a place. Voluntary contributions, PTA fundraising asks or “founder” donations are common in many schools’ income mix, but the Code is explicit that no financial contribution can be sought or expected as a condition of admission, and marketing materials should never blur that line.
In-year admissions have to run on the same clear, published basis as the main round. The 2021 Code strengthened requirements around in-year admissions specifically to reduce gaps in education for vulnerable children moving between schools. If your website or open evening talk suggests a more flexible or faster in-year process than what’s actually published, you’re setting up a complaint before you’ve had a chance to help the family.

None of this stops a school marketing itself. It just means the marketing has to describe the same admission arrangements that are actually determined, consulted on and published — not a friendlier-sounding version of them. Complaints about arrangements that don’t meet the Code can be referred to the Office of the Schools Adjudicator, and objections are a real, live mechanism, not a theoretical one. If your governors haven’t looked at your determined admission arrangements alongside your marketing materials in the same room recently, that’s a half-day well spent before the next open day season.

Open days that show the real school

The most common failure mode in school marketing isn’t dishonesty in the legal sense. It’s staging — presenting a version of the school that only exists on the day families are watching. Everyone in the sector has seen it: the corridor display that went up that morning, the “typical lesson” that was rehearsed, the best-behaved class scheduled for the tour route. Families notice, even when they can’t articulate why the visit felt slightly unreal. And when it does work as a sales pitch, it creates a specific, avoidable problem: a family enrols on the strength of a day that wasn’t representative, and by October they feel misled, whether or not anyone lied to them.

The alternative is not to under-sell the school. It’s to let ordinary practice carry the weight. A Tuesday morning phonics session that hasn’t been tidied up for visitors tells a prospective parent more than a curated showcase ever will, because it’s the thing they’ll actually be sending their child into. Schools that do this well tend to share a few habits: they let visitors see more than one year group and more than one part of the day, including transitions and lunchtime, which is where a school’s culture is most visible and hardest to fake. They let the SENCo or inclusion lead speak directly to parents who ask about additional needs, rather than routing every question through a generic tour script. And they’re willing to answer “what’s a normal Tuesday actually like here” with an honest answer rather than a brochure one.

Testimonials that hold up

Parent and pupil testimonials are genuinely persuasive, more so than most other marketing content a school can produce, because they read as independent rather than self-authored. That’s exactly why they need to be handled carefully. A testimonial pulled from a survey response without asking whether it can be used publicly, attributed to “a parent” with no way to verify it’s real, or quietly edited to remove a caveat, does more reputational damage than good once it’s noticed — and in a small community, it gets noticed.

Good practice here is unglamorous but effective: ask permission specifically for public use, keep testimonials attributable to real people wherever families are comfortable with that (even just a first name and year group), and don’t strip out the texture that makes them credible. A testimonial that says “it took my son a term to settle in, but the staff kept us updated every step and he’s thriving now” will do more for a family weighing up a hard decision than a flawless one-liner, because it sounds like something a real parent would actually say.

Being upfront about what you don’t offer

This is the part of honest marketing that leadership teams find hardest, because it feels like handing a competitive advantage to another school. In practice it’s the opposite. Families who choose a school on the strength of a gap they didn’t know about — no on-site breakfast club, limited capacity for a specific SEN need, a smaller extracurricular offer than a school down the road, no dedicated forest school site — are the families most likely to become dissatisfied, to complain, and to talk about that dissatisfaction to other parents in the catchment. In a market where every unfilled place has a funding cost attached, that word of mouth compounds.

The Advertising Standards Authority’s rules on marketing communications apply to schools as much as any other organisation: claims must not mislead by inaccuracy, ambiguity, exaggeration or omission, and marketers need to be able to evidence what they say. The ASA has upheld complaints against school marketing before — a leaflet for the Seckford Foundation’s Beccles Free School was banned after complaints upheld that it overstated a headteacher’s role and mischaracterised the outcome of a pre-registration inspection as having been passed “with flying colours,” when pre-registration inspections only give a “likely to meet” or “not likely to meet” judgement, not a pass mark. It’s a useful reminder that even well-intentioned enthusiasm in a leaflet can cross into a claim you can’t actually stand behind.

A simpler standard works well in practice: if a prospective parent would reasonably feel misled after a term at the school, don’t say it in the prospectus. That covers claims about behaviour, about how quickly SEN needs are typically met, about class sizes that only apply to some year groups, and about facilities that are aspirational rather than built.

Feeder nurseries and other settings: relationships beat leaflets

For most primary schools, the highest-yield “marketing” investment isn’t marketing at all — it’s the relationship with local nurseries, childminders and pre-schools that feed the Reception intake. DfE guidance on early education partnerships (updated July 2026) sets out funding and expectations for strengthening exactly these relationships between early years providers and their receiving schools, precisely because the transition into Reception is where a family’s confidence in a school is often set before they’ve even filled in a preference form.

This works best as genuine two-way practice rather than a one-off recruitment visit in the summer term. Schools that do it well build ongoing contact across the year: staff visiting nursery settings to see children in their existing environment, information-sharing on individual children’s needs (with consent, and especially important for children with SEND, where continuity of strategy from nursery to Reception makes a real difference to how well a child settles), and joint transition events rather than a single open morning. None of this is expensive. It’s mostly time, consistency, and treating the nursery staff as professional colleagues rather than a referral channel. A headteacher or EYFS lead who is a known, trusted face at the local nursery by January does more for September admissions than a leaflet drop ever will, and it produces exactly the kind of informed, realistic expectations that reduce complaints later.

When marketing outruns reality

The actual risk in over-promising isn’t a bad review or an ASA complaint, though both are possible. It’s slower and more corrosive: a family arrives having been told, implicitly or explicitly, that the school will be a particular kind of experience, and the gap between that expectation and daily reality becomes the lens through which they view everything else the school does. A parent who was told SEN support was “excellent across the board” and then experiences a term-long wait for an assessment doesn’t just lose confidence in SEN provision — they start reading every other communication from the school with suspicion. That’s a much harder problem to fix than an unfilled place, and in a falling-roll environment, unhappy families talk to exactly the pool of parents you’re trying to reach with your next open day.

The schools that manage this well tend to treat marketing and pastoral honesty as the same discipline, owned by the same people. If your SENCo, your inclusion lead and your governors haven’t seen the marketing copy before it goes out, that’s usually where the gap between promise and delivery creeps in — not from dishonesty, but from a marketing draft written without input from the people who know exactly what the school can and can’t currently deliver.

A practical starting point

None of this requires a marketing budget most schools don’t have. It requires a short, honest audit before the next open day season:

Check that your published admission arrangements, your website and your open day talking points describe the same criteria, with nothing implied that isn’t determined.
Ask your SENCo and pastoral leads to read your prospectus and flag any claim they’d hesitate to stand behind in a parent meeting.
Replace at least one staged “showcase” element of your open day with an ordinary, unrehearsed slice of the school day.
Get explicit, specific permission before publishing any parent or pupil quote, and keep the honest texture in it.
Put a standing diary date with your two or three main feeder settings, not just a summer-term visit.
Say at least one true thing in your prospectus about what your school doesn’t offer, alongside what it does.

In a market with more places than children in many areas, the schools that hold their numbers steadily aren’t usually the ones with the sharpest marketing. They’re the ones where what families are told and what families experience are the same thing, consistently, over years. That reputation compounds in exactly the way overpromising erodes it.

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.

A child says something in the lunch queue that doesn’t quite sit right. A colleague mentions a bruise, or that a pupil has started flinching when a certain adult raises their voice. You’ve probably had a moment like this already, and if you haven’t, you will. Most teachers know they’re supposed to “tell the DSL” when something feels off, but a surprising number of staff — including experienced ones — have never actually sat down and worked out what that person does once you’ve told them, or what you’re expected to do yourself in the meantime. This is a plain guide to both.

What the DSL’s job actually covers

Every school and college in England is required to have a designated safeguarding lead. It’s not a title given lightly: under the current statutory guidance, Keeping Children Safe in Education (KCSIE), the DSL has to be a senior member of the school’s leadership team, and it’s explicitly not appropriate for the proprietor of a school to hold the role. The DSL takes lead responsibility for safeguarding and child protection, including online safety and understanding the school’s filtering and monitoring systems, and this has to be written into their job description rather than left as an informal add-on to someone’s timetable.

Governing bodies and proprietors are required to give the DSL “the appropriate status and authority” to do the job, along with the time, funding, training, resources and support needed to carry it out properly. In practice, that means a DSL isn’t just the person you happen to bump into in the corridor who seems approachable about this sort of thing. They’re the person the school has formally decided has the standing to make difficult calls, liaise with children’s social care and the police, sit in strategy meetings, and advise the headteacher when something serious comes up.

Day to day, the DSL is expected to be the point of contact for staff, parents and outside agencies on anything safeguarding-related; to manage referrals to children’s social care, the police, or the Disclosure and Barring Service where needed; to keep the school’s child protection file for each child up to date and transfer it securely when a pupil moves school; and to make sure every member of staff, including part-time and new starters, actually understands the child protection policy rather than just having signed to say they’ve read it. They’re also expected to know the local threshold and referral process well enough to use it under pressure, not just in theory.

DSL or deputy DSL — does it actually matter which one you speak to?

It’s entirely up to a school whether it has one deputy DSL or several, and there’s no legal requirement to have any at all, although in practice almost every school does, simply because a DSL can’t be everywhere at once. Deputies have to be trained to exactly the same standard as the DSL themselves, and during school hours a trained DSL or deputy should always be available for staff to speak to.

What deputies can’t do is inherit the DSL’s ultimate accountability. Day-to-day activity can be delegated to a properly trained deputy, but lead responsibility for child protection stays with the named DSL and can’t be handed off. For you as a member of staff, the practical point is simpler: if the DSL isn’t around, go to a deputy. If neither is available and something needs acting on straight away, speak to a member of the senior leadership team or take advice directly from local authority children’s social care — the guidance is clear that you should never let unavailability delay action, and whatever you do should be passed to the DSL or a deputy as soon as it’s practically possible afterwards.

What KCSIE expects of you, not just your DSL

It’s easy to think of safeguarding as “the DSL’s job” and everyone else’s job as simply noticing things and handing them over. That’s roughly right, but the guidance is specific about what “everyone else” actually has to know and do, and it’s worth being clear-eyed about it rather than assuming common sense will fill the gaps.

Recognise the signs. All staff are expected to understand the indicators of physical, emotional and sexual abuse, neglect, and exploitation, and to know that these rarely turn up as one clean, obvious sign — they overlap, and they can happen online as easily as offline. You’re not expected to diagnose anything. You are expected to notice and act with “professional curiosity” rather than assuming there’s an innocent explanation and moving on.
Know how to record and report a concern. This means knowing who your DSL and deputies actually are (not just that a policy document names one somewhere), and knowing the school’s process well enough to follow it without having to go and find the policy first.
Never promise a child confidentiality. This is one of the clearest lines in the whole of KCSIE, and it’s the one staff most often get uncomfortable with in the moment. If a child is disclosing something to you and asks you not to tell anyone, you cannot agree to that. The guidance is direct about why: promising secrecy is unlikely to be in the best interests of the child, however kind it feels in the moment. What you can promise is that you’ll only involve the people who need to be involved — normally the DSL, a deputy, and children’s social care if it goes that far — and that you’ll tell the child what happens next.
Reassure, don’t judge. A child or young person should never be left with the impression that they’ve created a problem by speaking up, and they should never be made to feel ashamed for it. That applies just as much to a disclosure of sexual harassment between pupils as it does to a disclosure about home.

The guidance sums this up with a phrase that’s worth keeping in mind whenever a term or a half-term goes by without anything happening: staff should maintain an attitude of “it could happen here.” Not because it’s likely on any given day, but because the schools that get this wrong are usually the ones that had quietly stopped believing it could.

Raising a concern: what to actually do, and how fast

If you have any concern about a child’s welfare, the expectation is that you act on it immediately, not once you’ve seen it happen twice, and not once you’ve had a chance to think it over at home. In practice that means:

Speak to the DSL or a deputy as soon as you reasonably can, following your school’s own child protection policy. Don’t assume a colleague has already flagged it — the guidance is explicit that staff shouldn’t assume someone else will take action, because that assumption is exactly how things get missed.
Write it down. Your record should include a clear, factual summary of what was said or observed, details of how you followed it up (who you told, and when), and a note of any action taken or decision reached. Stick to what was actually said or seen rather than your interpretation of it — notes like this can end up supporting a statutory assessment or, occasionally, a criminal investigation, so opinion has no place in them.
Don’t sit on it while you decide if it’s “serious enough.” That’s the DSL’s judgement to make, not yours, and making it is precisely what they’re trained and resourced to do.
If a child is in immediate danger, that changes the pace entirely — the guidance is clear that where a child is suffering, or is likely to suffer, harm, a referral to children’s social care (and the police, where appropriate) should be made immediately, not queued up for the next available DSL meeting.

If you’re ever unsure whether something is “worth mentioning,” the honest answer from the guidance is: mention it anyway. A nagging doubt is a legitimate reason to speak to the DSL, even if it turns out to be nothing.

What happens after you’ve reported it

This is the part most staff have the least visibility into, partly because it happens above their day-to-day view, and partly because confidentiality quite rightly limits what gets shared back. Broadly, once a concern reaches the DSL, they’re weighing up three routes, and they’re not mutually exclusive.

Managing it internally. Some concerns don’t need outside agencies at all — a one-off incident that’s better handled through the school’s own pastoral support and behaviour policy, with everything still recorded and kept under review in case a pattern emerges later.

Early help. Early help means putting support in place as soon as a problem starts to emerge, rather than waiting for things to escalate to crisis point. It sits below the threshold for a statutory children’s social care response, and it’s meant for exactly the kind of situations that come up often in a normal school year: a child showing early signs of a mental health difficulty, a young carer quietly struggling, a family going through domestic abuse, drug or alcohol problems, or housing instability, a child at risk of criminal exploitation. Where early help is the right route, the DSL usually takes the lead on setting up an inter-agency assessment, though staff may be asked to support it. The important nuance, and one that NSPCC’s own guidance on early help is careful to flag, is that early help is not a substitute for a child protection response — if there’s real reason to believe a child is at risk of abuse or neglect, the school should go straight to child protection procedures rather than trying early help first and escalating later.

Referral to children’s social care. Where a child is suffering, or is likely to suffer, harm, this is where a case goes. Two pieces of the Children Act 1989 sit behind this: section 17, covering children “in need” who need extra services to reach a reasonable standard of health or development, and section 47, which is triggered where there’s reasonable cause to suspect a child is suffering, or likely to suffer, significant harm. Once a referral lands, the local authority’s social worker is expected to acknowledge it within one working day and decide the next steps — whether the child needs immediate protection, an assessment under section 17, enquiries under section 47, or further specialist input. If a school makes a referral and the child’s situation doesn’t seem to be improving afterwards, the guidance expects them to follow up and escalate again rather than assume the case has simply been closed.

Whichever route the DSL chooses, the case rarely just stops there. It gets kept under review — decisions are revisited if things change, referrals are made again if the picture worsens, and the child’s circumstances stay on someone’s radar rather than being filed and forgotten. That ongoing monitoring is as much a part of the DSL’s role as the initial decision.

The weight of this work, and where to get support

None of the above happens in a vacuum, and it’s worth saying plainly: being the person a child confides in, or the person who has to make a judgement call about whether a family is coping, carries a real emotional cost. That’s true whether you’re the DSL making the decision or the classroom teacher who took the disclosure in the first place and has been quietly turning it over ever since. KCSIE doesn’t say a great deal directly about supporting the staff member who raised a concern, but the culture it’s asking schools to build — one where concerns are taken seriously, shared responsibly, and never treated as an overreaction — depends on staff feeling supported enough to keep speaking up.

If you’re struggling with something you’ve been part of, a few concrete places to start: talk to your DSL or a trusted colleague, within the bounds of what should stay confidential; ask whether your school offers an employee assistance programme or access to counselling, which many do as standard; and know that NSPCC runs a helpline for professionals working with children (0808 800 5000, help@nspcc.org.uk) that can offer advice, not just to DSLs but to any member of staff who wants to talk something through. Separately, if you ever feel a genuine safeguarding concern isn’t being taken seriously within your own school, NSPCC’s whistleblowing advice line (0800 028 0285, available 8am–8pm weekdays and 9am–6pm at weekends) exists specifically for that situation.

If you want more plain-English explainers like this one for your own reading list, the free Inspire Hub section on Learnaroo Hub has others written for exactly this audience.

Before you go: check your own school’s policy

KCSIE is revised regularly — often annually — and the edition referred to throughout this article is Keeping Children Safe in Education 2025, which has applied in schools and colleges since 1 September 2025. A further edition, KCSIE 2026, has already been published by the Department for Education and is due to take effect from 1 September 2026, so depending on exactly when you’re reading this, your school may be working from a newer version with some details changed. This article is a general explainer, not a substitute for either document or for your own school’s safeguarding and child protection policy, which will set out your local process, your named DSL and deputies, and your local threshold arrangements in more detail than any general guide can. If anything here doesn’t match what your school tells you, follow your school’s policy and ask your DSL to clarify.

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.

Ask most headteachers what confuses them about SEND and money, and it’s rarely “identifying need” or “writing a good provision map.” It’s usually some version of: where does this money actually come from, who decides how much, and why does it never quite stretch far enough. That confusion isn’t a gap in your understanding. SEN funding in England moves through several different pots, calculated by different bodies, on different timetables, using terminology that hasn’t been explained properly to most people who now have to manage it. Layer a genuinely severe national funding crisis on top of that, and it’s no surprise that budget-setting season now carries as much anxiety about high needs as it does about staffing.

This piece sets out how the money actually flows, what that means for realistic budgeting, why the pressure you’re feeling is a national story rather than a local failure, and some practical ways to make funding go further without compromising provision. It draws on current Department for Education (DfE) guidance and recent reporting on the high needs funding system — all of it dated, all of it linked at the end, because these figures move.

How SEN funding actually flows: three layers, not one pot

The biggest source of confusion is that people talk about “SEN funding” as if it’s a single grant that arrives with a pupil. It isn’t. It’s three distinct layers, funded from two different national funding blocks, calculated and paid by two different organisations, on two different rhythms.

Element 1: the money already in your core budget

Every mainstream pupil on your roll brings core, per-pupil funding into your school through the Schools Block of the Dedicated Schools Grant (DSG), calculated via the national funding formula (NFF). This is sometimes referred to as Element 1. It isn’t SEN funding as such, but it’s the base your whole budget sits on, including the general capacity you use to differentiate teaching, run intervention groups and support pupils who don’t have a formal SEN status at all. Element 1 matters here because it’s the first thing LAs and DfE guidance point to when discussing what schools are already expected to fund from their own resources.

Element 2: your notional SEN budget, and the £6,000 threshold

This is where most of the confusion lives. Every mainstream school has a “notional SEN budget” — not a separate pot of cash sitting in a different account, but an amount identified within your existing delegated budget, calculated by the LA using local funding formula factors (things like prior attainment, deprivation and other need-related measures). It’s an indicative figure, not a ring-fenced allowance.

DfE’s current operational guidance sets a mandatory threshold of £6,000 per pupil per year: schools are expected to meet the additional costs of SEN support up to that amount from their own delegated budget, before any high needs top-up funding from the LA applies. This isn’t a suggestion — DfE guidance is explicit that it functions as a threshold below which the school is expected to meet the cost itself. As of the guidance updated in January 2026, that £6,000 figure remains current, but you should treat it as something to verify every year, not assume carries over automatically.

Two things trip up even experienced SBMs here. First, £6,000 is not a per-pupil entitlement — the same guidance is explicit that it isn’t intended to provide £6,000 for every pupil with SEN, because most pupils’ support costs considerably less than that (DfE guidance elsewhere references an average SEN support cost closer to £3,500 a year). Second, the notional budget is a planning figure for the LA to use when setting your overall delegated budget, not a spending cap or a spending guarantee — you can spend more or less than your notional allocation on SEN support, and nobody claws back the difference. What actually matters for your own financial planning is what you’re really spending against what you’re really receiving, not the notional figure on a spreadsheet.

Element 3: high needs top-up funding

Once a pupil’s additional costs genuinely exceed that £6,000 threshold — almost always a pupil with an Education, Health and Care Plan (EHCP), though not exclusively — the LA can agree “top-up” funding, paid from the High Needs Block of the DSG rather than the Schools Block. This is Element 3.

Critically, there’s no national formula for this. Each LA designs its own approach, and most now use a banded model: an EHCP’s assessed level of need is matched to a funding band, and each band carries a fixed top-up value, reviewed at each pupil’s annual review in line with the SEND Code of Practice. Bands, values and the number of bands in use vary significantly between authorities — a Band 3 in one LA bears no necessary relationship to a Band 3 next door. If you work across a trust with schools in more than one LA, this is worth spelling out to your finance committee explicitly, because “the same EHCP need” can attract very different top-up values depending purely on postcode.

Specialist placements and EHCP-specific costs

Pupils placed in special schools, resourced provision or specialist units are usually funded differently again, through an agreed place-funding element (a base amount per commissioned place) plus a top-up on the same principle as mainstream. The exact place-funding figures are set locally and nationally negotiated year to year, so rather than quote a number here that may already be out of date by the time you read this, check your LA’s current high needs funding policy directly — every LA is required to publish one, usually alongside its schools forum papers.

What this means for budgeting realistically

Understanding the three layers is only useful if it changes how you plan. A few things worth building into your process:

Track actual SEN spend separately from the notional figure. The notional budget tells you what the LA assumed when setting your overall delegation, not what you’ll actually spend. Schools with a higher-than-average proportion of SEN support pupils routinely spend well above their notional figure from general funds, because the notional calculation is formula-driven, not needs-driven at individual pupil level.
Plan for a funding lag. Top-up funding doesn’t start the moment a need becomes apparent. Between a request for an Education, Health and Care Needs Assessment (EHCNA) and an agreed, funded EHCP, you’re commonly looking at months, sometimes well beyond the twenty-week statutory timescale that LAs are supposed to meet but frequently don’t, given the pressures described below. Your school is expected to keep funding provision up to the £6,000 threshold throughout that period regardless of where the paperwork has got to.
Budget for in-year growth, not just September numbers. Pupils with high needs move schools in-year more often than the general population, particularly at points of family or placement breakdown. Your high needs income for the year should never be treated as fixed at the September census.
One-off assessment and specialist costs sit outside top-up funding. Educational psychologist reports, occupational therapy assessments, specialist equipment and staff training are frequently funded separately, or not at all, and vary by LA policy. Don’t assume top-up funding is designed to absorb these.
Understand your LA’s specific top-up review cycle. If bands are reviewed annually at the EHCP annual review, a change in a pupil’s presentation partway through the year won’t automatically trigger a change in funding — you may be carrying a cost increase for months before the banding catches up, or conversely receiving funding for a level of need that’s since reduced.

None of this is a criticism of your finance systems. It’s simply that SEN and high needs income behaves differently to almost every other funding line schools manage, and treating it like a fixed annual grant is where budgets come unstuck.

The national picture: this is a genuine crisis, not a leadership failure

If your high needs budget feels impossibly tight, it’s worth knowing clearly that this is a well-documented, sector-wide funding crisis, not a sign you’re managing it worse than anyone else.

Local authorities have been permitted since 2020 to keep high needs overspends — the gap between what they receive in High Needs Block funding and what EHCP and SEN provision actually costs across their area — off their main council balance sheets, through a temporary accounting mechanism known as the statutory override. The Local Government Association (LGA) has reported that this cumulative national deficit reached billions of pounds, with the vast majority of councils responding to LGA surveys reporting a Dedicated Schools Grant deficit and warning of insolvency risk once the override ends. The override was originally due to lapse in March 2026; the government has since extended it, alongside a commitment to write off around 90% of councils’ historic SEND deficits accrued up to the end of 2025-26, leaving councils responsible for the remaining 10% and for managing costs going forward under a revised arrangement running to March 2028.

On top of that, the DfE took the unusual step of temporarily suspending the high needs national funding formula for 2026-27 — the mechanism normally used to calculate how much high needs funding each LA receives — and instead rolled forward each LA’s 2025-26 allocation with adjustments for pay and National Insurance costs, holding total national high needs funding at roughly £12 billion for the year. The department has said it will review the allocation methodology once wider SEND system reforms, expected in early 2026, are set out.

What that means in practice: the system you’re budgeting against is genuinely mid-reform, genuinely under-resourced relative to demand, and genuinely being reworked at a level well above your LA. Your SEND team at the LA is very likely managing the same pressure from the other direction — rising EHCP requests, a funding formula that’s paused rather than settled, and a deficit position their own council leadership is anxious about. That context doesn’t fix your budget, but it should change the conversation you have with governors: this isn’t “why can’t we manage this,” it’s “how do we manage well inside a system that’s under strain nationally.”

Making the funding stretch further

There’s no version of this that makes high needs funding pressure disappear. But there are things within a school’s control that genuinely help.

Invest early, and invest in what’s evidenced

The strongest lever most schools have is reducing the number of pupils whose needs escalate to EHCP level in the first place, through early, well-targeted SEN support funded from Element 1 and Element 2. That means a SENCO with real time allocated to identify need early rather than react to crisis, evidence-based interventions rather than a scattergun of resources, and a genuine graduated response — assess, plan, do, review — that’s followed consistently rather than treated as paperwork. This isn’t about avoiding legitimate EHCP requests to save money; a school that under-identifies need stores up bigger problems, and LAs and Ofsted’s area SEND inspections both look unfavourably on schools that appear to be gatekeeping assessment. It’s about making sure the support a child gets at SEN support stage is good enough that fewer children need to go further, and that when an EHCNA request is made, it’s well-evidenced and moves faster because the groundwork is already there.

Build a genuine working relationship with your LA’s SEND team

Schools that treat the LA SEND team purely as a gatekeeper to fight tend to have a harder time than schools that build a working relationship with them. That means understanding your LA’s local banding framework and funding policy in detail rather than only encountering it when a decision goes against you, engaging early and constructively in annual reviews rather than only at crisis points, and being a reliable, well-evidenced applicant — an LA officer managing a large caseload under deficit pressure will, understandably, move faster and more favourably for schools whose paperwork is consistently thorough and whose requests are consistently proportionate.

Get your own data right

Know your actual SEN and high needs spend against your notional budget and top-up income, not just at year-end but through the year, broken down by pupil where appropriate so you can see where costs are concentrated. This is what lets you have an evidenced conversation with your LA when top-up funding genuinely doesn’t cover a placement, and it’s what lets you brief governors accurately rather than defensively.

Being honest with governors about the financial reality

Governors and trustees carry real fiduciary responsibility for your budget, and SEN and high needs costs are one of the most common sources of in-year budget variance in schools right now. Being straightforward with them early serves you better than presenting a tidy budget in September and explaining an overspend in March.

A few things worth building into how you report:

Show SEN and high needs spend as its own clearly labelled line in budget monitoring reports, distinct from general staffing, so governors can see the trend rather than have it absorbed into a general variance.
Be explicit about the gap, if there is one, between notional SEN budget, actual SEN support spend, and top-up income received — and explain why that gap exists, rather than letting it look like a management failure.
Flag pupils in the pipeline — EHCNA requests submitted, annual reviews due, placements likely to change — as a forward risk register item, not just a current-year cost.
Name the national context plainly. Governors who understand that high needs funding is under acknowledged national strain, with LAs themselves running deficits and a national formula currently on hold, are far better placed to support difficult in-year decisions than governors who think the pressure is unique to your school.
Where a decision genuinely has no good option — reducing non-EHCP intervention provision to protect statutory EHCP costs, for instance — bring that to governors as a real choice with real trade-offs, rather than making it quietly and hoping nobody asks.

None of this makes the underlying pressure smaller. But a governing body that understands the mechanics and the national context is a governing body that can back you when you need to make a hard call, and that’s worth the extra time it takes to explain it properly.

The bottom line

SEN funding is genuinely complicated, not because anyone is trying to make it hard to understand, but because it sits across three funding layers, two different funding blocks, locally variable banding models, and a national system that’s currently being held together with a temporary accounting override while a bigger reform is worked out. Understanding the mechanics — what’s yours to fund up to £6,000, what the LA funds above it, how top-up banding actually works locally, and why the deficit picture nationally is as severe as it is — won’t make the money go further on its own. But it will make your budgeting more accurate, your LA conversations more productive, and your governors better equipped to support you through what is, for almost every school in the country right now, a genuinely difficult financial picture rather than a local one.

Figures, thresholds and formulas referenced in this article change, sometimes within a financial year. Always check the current DfE high needs and schools operational guidance for the relevant year, and your own local authority’s published high needs funding and SEND policy, before using any figure here in budget planning or governor reporting.

There’s a particular kind of lesson that happens when Ofsted is in the building. The questioning gets more theatrical. The mini-whiteboards come out for things that didn’t need mini-whiteboards. Someone’s stuck a “learning objective” on the board in a font they never normally use. Every teacher who’s been through more than one inspection knows this lesson, and most of them will privately tell you it wasn’t their best one.

If you’re getting ready for an observation, learning walk or full inspection, it’s worth starting from what Ofsted itself now says it’s doing, rather than the version of Ofsted that’s been passed down through staffroom folklore for the last decade. Some of that folklore is out of date. Some of it was never quite accurate. This article looks at what the current framework actually asks for, why trying to put on a show tends to work against you, and what to do with your nerves instead.

What Ofsted actually says it’s looking for now

Since 10 November 2025, inspections in England have run under a renewed framework, and the old single-word overall judgement (outstanding, good, requires improvement, inadequate) has been replaced with a report card. Schools are now assessed area by area rather than given one headline label, using a five-point scale that runs from “urgent improvement” up to “exceptional,” with “needs attention,” “expected standard” and “strong standard” in between. The point of splitting the judgement this way is to stop a whole school being reduced to a single adjective when, in reality, different aspects of its work can be in quite different places.

For a classroom teacher, the detail that matters most sits in Ofsted’s own School Inspection Toolkit, which is the document inspectors actually work from. It’s direct about individual lessons: “We do not grade individual teachers or lessons.” Ofsted’s national director for education has said much the same thing in plainer terms, telling reporters the organisation is not going back to grading individual staff off the back of a single lesson visit. Inspectors instead build a picture of teaching and learning across the school as a whole, drawing on several lessons, pupils’ books, conversations with staff and pupils, and what leaders can show them about how the curriculum is planned and taught over time. One lesson, on one day, in front of one class, was never a reliable way to judge a teacher, and Ofsted has said so plainly enough that it’s not really a myth to bust any more.

The toolkit is equally direct about some of the other things that used to drive extra workload before an inspection. There’s no expectation that workbooks are marked or presented in a particular way, and no set frequency or volume of marking that inspectors are checking against. Schools aren’t expected to produce a presentation, a special pack of documents, or any evidence built specifically for the visit. Pupils aren’t supposed to be given work designed to look good for an inspector rather than to teach them something. None of that is new exactly, but it’s now written into the current guidance in plain terms rather than living in a separate “mythbusting” leaflet that people forgot to read.

The report card changed the paperwork, not the theatre

It’s worth being honest that a new grading model doesn’t automatically change classroom behaviour, because the anxiety around inspection was never really about the exact wording of the grade. It was about being watched, being judged, and worrying that a bad ten minutes might follow you around. That anxiety doesn’t disappear just because the outcome is now called “needs attention” instead of “requires improvement.”

What has shifted, alongside the report card, is the format of the visit itself. Deep dives, the subject-by-subject sampling exercise that dominated inspections under the previous framework, have been scaled back in favour of learning walks: shorter, more conversational visits where a senior leader walks inspectors around the school and talks them through what they’re seeing as they go. Ofsted’s own account of the early pilots described the collaborative tone and the shift away from deep dives as one of the more positively received changes among the school leaders involved. Leaders also get a say in shaping the inspection timetable and in deciding who accompanies inspectors on these walks, rather than having a fixed sampling process imposed on them.

Ofsted has also acknowledged, in its own guidance published ahead of further updates due from September 2026, that learning walks had started to add pressure and extra workload to the ordinary running of a school day. Off the back of that, it’s tightened the guidance so that walks stay focused on curriculum, teaching and achievement, agreed in advance through planning conversations with leaders, with regular reflection meetings to keep leaders informed of what inspectors are noticing as the day unfolds. That’s a useful thing to know if you’re the one being walked past: the inspector in your doorway is working to a fairly narrow, pre-agreed focus, not fishing for anything they can find.

Why “performing” a lesson tends to backfire

Put a class through a lesson that’s been dressed up for visitors and a few things usually go wrong at once. The pace often gets rushed because there’s a script to get through. Pupils, who are far more attuned to a change in their teacher’s behaviour than we sometimes give them credit for, pick up on the shift in tone and either play along stiffly or, just as often, undercut it completely by behaving exactly as they would on any other Tuesday. Routines that normally run on autopilot, like how you hand out books or how transitions between tasks work, get replaced with versions nobody in the room has practised, which is when they tend to go wrong.

Inspectors sit through a lot of lessons, in a lot of schools, and they’re generally quick to notice when what’s happening in front of them doesn’t match the visible evidence of what normally happens: books that don’t reflect the standard of the lesson being taught, pupils who can’t answer a basic question about what they usually do in this subject, or a level of formality that clearly isn’t the room’s normal register. Because judgements are built from a sequence of lessons and multiple sources of evidence rather than a single flashy performance, a one-off show doesn’t have much to land on anyway. It can also actively work against you, because it draws attention to the gap between the display lesson and everything else the inspector is seeing that day.

There’s also a simpler, more practical cost. A performed lesson takes energy and headspace that would be better spent on the things that actually help: knowing your class, knowing your subject, and being ready to talk about your own decisions with confidence. Rehearsing a version of yourself for one hour of one day is a strange use of the limited nervous energy you’ve got on inspection day.

What genuinely helps: teach the lesson you’d teach anyway

The advice that gets repeated most often by people who’ve been through several inspections, on both sides of the process, is also the least exciting: teach the lesson you’d have taught if nobody was watching. That doesn’t mean doing nothing differently. It means the differences should be the ones you’d make for good teaching reasons anyway, not for an audience.

A few things tend to hold up well under observation because they hold up well full stop:

Following your normal sequencing and routines, including the boring bits, like how you start the lesson and how you check understanding before moving on.
Setting work that’s pitched at where your pupils actually are, rather than a version simplified or dressed up for the visit.
Letting pupils struggle a little where struggle is part of the learning, instead of over-scaffolding everything to avoid a wrong answer being seen.
Using the resources, seating plan and behaviour approaches you use every other day, not a special-occasion version.

None of this is about being casual or under-prepared. It’s about the preparation going into the lesson content and the thinking behind it, rather than into stage-managing how the room looks for forty minutes.

Know your pupils’ starting points, and be ready to talk about them

One of the clearest through-lines in the current framework is the interest in how well leaders and teachers understand where pupils started, not just where they’ve ended up. That shows up in the toolkit’s focus on how well different groups of pupils are achieving, belonging and being supported, with particular attention on disadvantaged pupils, pupils with special educational needs and disabilities, and pupils known or previously known to children’s social care.

For a classroom teacher, that translates into a fairly practical expectation: you should be able to talk, without notice, about what a particular pupil or group of pupils could and couldn’t do before this unit of work started, and what you’ve adjusted because of that. If a pupil with SEND has extra support in your lesson, be ready to explain what it’s for and why, in plain terms, rather than reaching for jargon you think an inspector wants to hear. If your class includes pupils who are behind where you’d expect for their age, be ready to say what you’re doing about the gap rather than hoping it doesn’t come up.

This is one of the areas where ordinary good practice and inspection readiness genuinely overlap. If you already track starting points, keep a record of what’s been taught and to what depth, and can point to why a pupil is grouped, supported or stretched the way they are, you’re not doing anything extra for the observation. You’re just able to describe, out loud, work you were already doing.

Be ready to talk about your own practice, honestly

Inspectors don’t only watch lessons; they talk to the people teaching them, and how that conversation goes often matters more than the lesson itself. The honest, slightly uncomfortable answer tends to land better than the polished one. If a starter didn’t quite work, saying so and explaining what you’d change next time reads as a teacher who reflects on their own practice, which is exactly what the framework is trying to see evidence of at a whole-school level too.

It helps to be able to talk about three things without much notice: what you’re teaching and why it comes at this point in the sequence, how you know whether pupils have understood it, and what you do when they haven’t. None of that requires a script. It requires knowing your subject and your class well enough that the answers are already true, which is a different kind of preparation to rehearsing what to say.

It’s also fine, and often better, to say “I’m not sure, let me think about that” than to guess at an answer that sounds confident but isn’t accurate. Inspectors aren’t trying to catch anyone out on a technicality, and a considered answer tends to carry more weight than an instant one that doesn’t quite hold up.

Managing your own nerves

None of the reassurance about what Ofsted does and doesn’t grade makes the day itself feel low-stakes, and there’s no point pretending otherwise. A few things that genuinely help on the day, rather than in the weeks of anticipation before it:

Do the ordinary version of your pre-lesson routine, whatever that normally is, rather than a new one you’ve never tried before.
Accept that an inspector walking in mid-explanation is not a crisis; carry on, finish the point, and bring them in naturally rather than stopping to restart for their benefit.
Remember that a learning walk is typically brief, part of a much bigger picture the inspector is building across the day, and not a verdict delivered in the room.
If your school has had a pre-inspection briefing, trust it rather than second-guessing it on the morning itself.

It’s also worth remembering that the workload pressure around learning walks hasn’t gone unnoticed by Ofsted itself; it’s part of what prompted the further guidance updates due from September 2026, which are intended to keep walks more tightly focused rather than open-ended. That’s not a reason to relax entirely, but it’s a fair reason to stop treating every classroom visit as an open audit of everything you’ve ever done.

What a learning walk actually looks like now

Under the current arrangements, a learning walk is usually led by a senior leader who walks inspectors through a sequence of classrooms, giving context as they go rather than leaving inspectors to interpret a silent snapshot on their own. The leader might explain what a class has been working on, how it fits into the wider curriculum sequence, or why a particular pupil is grouped the way they are. Visits to any one classroom tend to be short, sometimes only a few minutes, and are one part of a much larger evidence base inspectors are building from lesson visits, pupils’ books, conversations with staff and pupils, and discussions with leaders about curriculum design.

Because leaders are involved in shaping where inspectors go and what they’re focused on, a learning walk is less of a surprise event than the deep dives it’s replaced. Regular check-in conversations through the day mean leaders usually have a reasonable sense of what inspectors have noticed as they go, rather than everyone waiting until the final feedback meeting to find out. None of that removes the pressure of having someone unfamiliar in the room, but it does mean the visit is built around a fairly specific, pre-agreed focus rather than a general inspection of everything happening in your classroom that day.

One practical implication: if your school briefs you in advance on what inspectors are focusing on that day, that’s genuinely useful information, not just reassurance. It tells you where the conversation is likely to go if an inspector does stop to talk to you, and it’s a much better use of your prep time than trying to anticipate every possible question.

The bottom line

Ofsted’s own current guidance is fairly blunt: individual lessons and individual teachers aren’t graded, judgements are built from a wider picture over time, and schools aren’t expected to produce special work, presentations or documents for the visit. Treating a lesson observation as an exam to be crammed for, or a performance to get through, works against nearly everyone. Treating it as one visit to a lesson that’s part of a much longer story your pupils’ books, your planning and your day-to-day teaching are already telling tends to hold up far better.

If you keep records of what you’ve taught, what pupils could do before and after, and why particular pupils are supported the way they are, a tool like Learnaroo Hub can be a handy place to keep that picture in one spot, so it’s easy to talk through if a leader asks you to walk them through a class ahead of a visit. But the record only matters because the underlying practice is sound. The paperwork should describe the teaching, not replace it.

Inspection practice and guidance change fairly often, and this article reflects the framework and toolkit in use as of August 2026. Before relying on any of this for a real inspection, check the current School Inspection Toolkit and Education Inspection Framework on GOV.UK, or your school’s own inspection lead, for the version in force at the time.

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.

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