The Lundy Loop at Tees Valley
What we built, why we built it this way, and what may be useful to other schools in the group · Matt Roper · July 2026
These are working documents written by Matt Roper about his own initiative, shared as written. They record one teacher's proposals and are not an organisational position.
Context
The Feedback & Marking Policy arrived with its framework — the Lundy participation model — but deliberately without implementation guidance, so each school could develop an approach suited to its pupils and share what works. Tees Valley has taken that invitation seriously. Over the past term we have built, trialled and refined a complete implementation suite: whole-school reference, ten subject "dialect" guides, a leadership and QA layer, a SEND overlay, pupil-facing materials, staff training including an interactive calibration exercise, and classroom posters. It is all draft, all watermarked as such, and all deliberately positioned beneath approved policy.
The five design decisions that shaped everything
| Decision | Why it matters for our pupils |
|---|---|
| The R-gate is the one non-negotiable | R is written only after a genuine response has been genuinely received. Everything else in the suite is guidance; this single rule prevents feedback becoming a decorative paper exercise. |
| Subject dialects, not one recipe | A watched re-attempt in PE, a second draft in Art and a purple-pen correction in Science are all complete loops. Ten subject guides translate the same four-stage architecture without forcing every loop into a worksheet. |
| Anti-workload by design | No evidence is created solely for audit; no loop quotas, tallies or parallel folders. Written feedback becomes strategic rather than routine — the pilot should reduce marking burden, and we will measure whether it does. |
| SEND triage before judgement | A non-response is diagnosed as can't-yet, won't-now or can't-this-way — each with a different move. In an SEMH setting this distinction is the difference between feedback that teaches and feedback that harms. |
| The disclosure firewall always wins | The moment discursive work approaches a disclosure, the feedback loop stops and safeguarding procedure takes precedence. Built into every discursive subject guide and the staff training. |
Where pupil outcomes show up
Impact is judged entirely on measures we already hold: response chains in books, Itslearning judgements (emerging → developing → secure → exceeding), STAR assessment repeats against each pupil's own baseline, and IEDP/APDR cycles that now cite what pupils did and said, not only what adults observed. The falsifiable claim: if the loop works, the same pupil closes the same class of gap in fewer attempts over a term. For LAUNCH pupils the closed-loop chain doubles as a personalised revision map; for pupils on the SEND register, the Loop Passport's Voice record quietly builds JCQ normal-way-of-working evidence in the background.
How it launches
September INSET anchor: a 25-minute twilight built around one real exercise book and a fourteen-scenario calibration exercise, ending with the whole staff agreeing the single rule. Leadership then coaches through learning walks using a phone-based logger whose fields match our QA sheet exactly — one noticed loop per walk, pupil initials only, no staff names, and a termly vignette per pathway instead of a tally. Impact is reviewed termly against an anonymous staff pulse, with an honest trigger built in: if responses rise but workload doesn't fall, we pause and fix before scaling.
What may travel to other schools
| Transferable as-is | Needs local adaptation |
|---|---|
| The R-gate rule, the calibration exercise, the anti-workload principles, the disclosure firewall, the triage model | Subject dialect detail, pathway structures, pupil-facing language, the specific measures each school already holds |
Everything is a self-contained set of browser-based documents — no logins, no platform dependency — so any school in the group could pick it up, keep what fits and rewrite the rest. We're very happy to share the full pack, the training materials and, more useful still, whatever we learn from the autumn term's pulse and vignettes, warts and all.