Key Stage 3 comes to TeachEdge: feedback shaped around your teaching

Key Stage 3 is now available in TeachEdge, in both Quick Mark and Class Marking.

Schools have been asking about using TeachEdge with younger students, and I could see why. There is a great deal of work in Years 7, 8 and 9 that would benefit from individual feedback. Finding the time to give that feedback across several classes is the familiar difficulty.

The question for me was how to make it useful for the way teachers actually assess at KS3.

TeachEdge's GCSE and A-level marking is built around particular qualifications, question types and assessment requirements. At KS3, the starting point is often much more specific to your teaching: what have you taught this class, what are they practising, and what would you like them to improve?

That is the thinking behind this addition.

You decide what matters in the task

You might give a Year 7 English class a descriptive writing task because you want them to practise creating atmosphere. A few weeks later, you might use a similar task to focus on sentence variety or paragraphing.

The work may look similar, but the feedback you want will be different.

With the new KS3 option, you can give TeachEdge the subject and year group, then describe how you would like the work assessed. You can explain the focus of the task, set out relevant success criteria and say what sort of feedback would be useful.

That gives you room to be quite precise. You might want attention paid to the use of evidence in a history paragraph, the explanation of a process in science, or a particular stage of a calculation in maths.

The teacher's instructions provide the context for the feedback.

Marks when they are useful

You can choose marks with feedback, or feedback only.

Sometimes a mark is useful. You may have a short assessment with clear criteria and want students to see how well they have met them.

For other tasks, you may want their attention on one thing they have done well and one thing they should work on next. The feedback-only option lets you do that without attaching a numerical score.

From my own time in the classroom, I know how much thought goes into deciding what to comment on. There may be several things a student could improve, but you still have to decide what will help them most at that point.

That is the sort of decision I wanted teachers to be able to express in TeachEdge.

A simple example

Take this short English task:

Write one paragraph describing a stormy night. Create a sense of tension using vivid vocabulary and at least one simile or metaphor.

A teacher could give TeachEdge instructions along these lines:

This is a Year 7 class practising descriptive writing. Focus on atmosphere and effective language choices. Identify one thing the student has done well and give one specific next step. Keep the language straightforward. Give feedback only, without a mark.

For a response that creates a clear stormy setting but relies on familiar phrases, an illustrative next step might be:

Choose one familiar phrase, such as "a huge black blanket", and replace it with a more precise image of your own. Think about how the clouds move or what they hide.

That gives the student something concrete to try. It also gives the teacher a straightforward follow-up: ask students to revise one sentence using their feedback.

The same principle applies across subjects. Start with what you want students to learn, then make the feedback useful for that purpose.

Save an approach you want to use again

You can also save your assessment instructions as a named approach.

Once you have worked out how you want feedback given on a particular kind of task, you can return to those instructions and adapt them for the next piece of work.

That should be useful for recurring activities, where the topic changes but the skills you are looking for remain similar.

KS3 is available through Quick Mark and Class Marking. Within Class Marking, teachers can review and edit feedback before releasing it to students.

Try it with something you already teach

My suggestion is to start with a task you know well.

Choose a short piece of work, explain what you have been teaching and describe what you want the feedback to focus on. Then read the result with your knowledge of the class in mind.

I'm particularly interested in how schools use this flexibility. KS3 covers a wide range of subjects, ages and approaches to assessment. Giving teachers room to bring that context into TeachEdge was central to the design.

I hope it makes it easier to give students useful feedback on everyday work, with a next step they can understand and put into practice.

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