I’ve just had feedback from a book scrutiny on my Year 10 Drama GCSE group. These have been some interesting bits of feedback that I want to reflect on.

Firstly though, for context, in Drama we keep our classwork in folders and we have homework books for written work. This is because the class work tends to be recording progress using big A3 Graphic Organisers and DIRT Sheets and we have a homework book to write written responses to exam questions in. The folders do have their problems, the biggest is that they are difficult to maintain and hard to keep in chronological order. However, I think they are better than having a book and sticking in all the sheets every lesson.

The nature of the feedback I received from by book scrutiny was partly regarding the nature of folders versus books. The first piece of feedback was that whilst they knew all the evidence was there, it wasn’t there on first glance – the kind of glance an Ofsted inspector might give it. The essentially that on an Ofsted level, the evidence of progress might not always be there.

There is a lot of feedback that the students receive and it is frustrating that it might not be immediately evident at first sight.

The forms of feedback that the students receive are:

• Post-It note feedback (both peer marking and teaching marking) which evidences verbal feedback
• DIRT review sheets
• Highlighted and annotated assessment criteria for Performances showing where marks were given and where marks can be gained next time.
• Footnote marking on all extended writing tasks.
• Highlighted and annotated assessment criteria for written work showing where the marks were given and what stopped them from getting any higher.

The only piece of feedback that isn’t kept in their folders is the Post-It note feedback, so it is a shame that on first glance their progress isn’t evidenced. How do I make that happen without too much extra workload and to make it a benefit to the students (as this is where this begins to rancour with me as I don’t want to do all this work just to satisfy a tick in a box but rather for the progress of my students)?