At Sheldon College, reporting had traditionally captured learning after much of it had already happened.
The College wanted feedback to play a more active role while students were still learning, giving them a clearer sense of how they were progressing, helping teachers respond earlier, and giving families more context along the way.
That led Sheldon College to rethink assessment, rubrics and reporting across Years 1 to 12.
“Having a continuous or progressive approach changed our method of reporting, allowing our teachers to have rich conversations with students and their parents about their learning during the learning process rather than at the end of the learning journey.”
Creating one language for progress
One of the biggest pieces of work happened behind the feedback itself.
Sheldon College moved from a 15-point scale to a five-point scale and reviewed how achievement was described across subjects and year levels. Heads of Faculty redeveloped rubrics around a shared structure, with indicators informed by achievement standards and a consistent bank of language for descriptors.
The goal was to make assessment easier for students and families to interpret, wherever they were in the College.
That meant a parent looking at feedback in Year 1 and another looking at feedback in Year 12 would encounter a more consistent approach to how progress was described.
“Sheldon College now has consistency from Year 1 to Year 12 as to where all the elements of a rubric come from.”
Making the change manageable for teachers
Changing the assessment model also meant thinking carefully about implementation.
A cross-functional committee considered the impact on teachers, students, parents, Heads of Faculty and administration. Heads of Faculty did much of the preparation work, including rebuilding approved rubrics before they were digitised and made available through Schoolbox.
For classroom teachers, that meant they weren’t being asked to recreate the system themselves. They could select an approved rubric and apply it to the work they were already setting.
Training was provided through videos, written guides and printed resources, with additional one-to-one support for staff who needed it.
Looking beyond the rubric
As the model developed, Sheldon College identified another important piece: consistency in the quality of the feedback itself.
The College created a continuous feedback framework and guidance around comments and different modes of feedback, drawing on educational research to help staff think about what useful feedback should actually do.
That shifted the conversation beyond simply digitising assessment.
“We needed to develop style guides for our comments, modes of feedback, and align these to research in regards to what does quality feedback look like so that improvement can actually happen.”
Giving reporting time back to learning
A key motivation was teacher time.
By collecting assessment and feedback progressively in Schoolbox, teachers were building a richer body of information throughout the term. That data could then support moderation, mark books and the formal reports issued twice a year.
It reduced the need to reconstruct a picture of student progress when reporting time arrived.
More importantly, it moved useful conversations closer to the point where students could still act on them.
For Sheldon College, the change was bigger than putting rubrics online. It created a common language for progress across the College and made feedback part of the learning process itself.
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