x Middle Leaders

Middle Leaders: Leading a Primary School Moderation Meeting

In your middle leadership role, you may be asked to host and manage a moderation meeting for your subject area.
This could be for moderation within your own school; it could also be for a cluster of schools as part of a learning
collaborative or multi-academy trust.

The Purpose of a Moderation Meeting

Providing the opportunity for teachers to meet together and compare and discuss their decisions around the attainment
of their pupils, not only boosts a teacher’s understanding of standards and confidence in assessing, it also provides
a benchmark for assessments. This benchmarking helps with consistency in teacher judgements across year groups
and phases, and in a broader context across schools too. When leading a moderation meeting, you should have your
overarching aim at the back of your mind throughout the planning, organising and leading of the meeting.

Ask yourself:
• What do I want my colleagues to get out of this • How will moderation impact on the quality of teaching
meeting? and learning?
• How will this meeting benefit my colleagues?

Planning a Moderation Meeting

Once you have established what your aim for the meeting is, you will need to decide how you want the meeting to run.

Ask yourself:
• Which subject is being moderated?
• When will the meeting take place?
• Where will it be held?
• Who will be attending the meeting? How many people?
• Which key stages and year groups will be involved and
how many teachers from each?
• Is this the first meeting for this group of teachers or
have they met before?
• What preparations will need to be made in advance?
Try using the first planning sheet included with this resource to help you answer these questions and to plan out your
ideas in advance.
• What will attendees need to bring with them?
• How will you communicate information prior to the
meeting?
• What will happen during the meeting?
• What resources will need to be provided?
• How will attendees be organised to moderate?
• What working spaces will be required?
• How much time is available?

Organising a Moderation Meeting

Administration and Communication
Once you have thoroughly planned your meeting, you will need to put your plan into action. First of all, take care of
administrative tasks. Make sure all the attendees know when and where the meeting will take place and what they need
to bring with them. If you are setting a specific task for children to complete to use for moderation, then you must also
communicate this with the teachers/schools attending, providing all the resources they will need to complete the task
with their classes. If not, you should ask attendees to bring a range of work for a pupil or pupils at a specific level, for
example, a pupil who is working within age-related expectations.

The week before the meeting, you may want to email attendees to remind them of the meeting details and what they will
need to bring with them. You may also wish to begin putting together any resources that will be provided at the meeting
and organising them accordingly. If you will be providing refreshments for the meeting, you will need to arrange for these
to be provided well in advance also.

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Timings, Groupings and Meeting Content

Once the administration of the meeting has been organised, you may want to work on the sequence of events for the
meeting. The second planning sheet included with this resource may help you to plan how the meeting will run.

Decide how you will open and close the meeting and prepare any presentation or resources you would like to share with
the attendees. You may have found a particularly useful resource or video you think will benefit your colleagues and may
have chosen to share it, or you may have an activity to break the ice and begin conversations on the moderation process.
Use your introduction as a chance to enthuse your colleagues in your subject and prepare them for moderation.

Think about how you will organise the process of moderation. How will you split your attendee teachers? Will they sit
in year groups, phases, key stages? This will depend upon the numbers attending. If hosting multiple schools, you will
probably organise in year groups, within a singular, small-school meeting, then phases or even key stages would work
better. Once this has been established, you will need to decide how you will communicate this to your colleagues, along
with the workspaces they will be using. When planning workspaces, you need to decide if you will stay together but use
different tables in a hall, or whether each group will split to a different classroom or workspace within the school. Do not
forget to share timings for moderation. Be clear and keep it to the time available, so if you have planned a 45-minute slot
to actually moderate, split this down further into how long should be spent moderating each pupil’s work. If the group has
not worked together before, then you might plan in time for introductions within their working parties. Also, depending on
the size of the moderation groups, you may want to instruct them to split into smaller groups or pairs to actually discuss
children’s work. Make sure you decide all of this in advance and communicate it clearly to your colleagues after your
introduction.

The Leader’s Role in Moderation

Do not forget to decide what you will do during the meeting. A moderation meeting is a good chance for you as subject
leader to have subject-specific conversations with colleagues and for you to see a broad sample of children’s work in
your subject area. Maybe plan to circulate between the groups to chat, help out and observe then give yourself time to
make notes about what you have seen to keep in your subject leader file. Also, you may want to be available to ‘sign-off’
any hard-to-reach judgements on moderated levels.

Closing the Meeting and Receiving Feedback

Lastly, choose how you will close your meeting. Will you gather all the moderation groups back together and collectively
gather feedback on the process? Will you ask the moderation groups to collate their feedback together for you to collect
from them? Think about what sort of feedback would be useful for you and also those attending and share questions for
attendees to answer, either individually or in groups. One idea may be to have large sheets of paper with questions on
and attendees answer on sticky notes to attach to the paper.

Questions you could ask:

• What went well today? • What could have been better?
• Do you have any questions? • Was there anything that you disagreed on?
• What areas were difficult to find evidence for? • What would you like to focus on in the next meeting?

Decide what you will do with the completed moderation forms you have used. Will teachers keep their own copy and will
you keep a copy? You may want to create a file with examples of children’s work and their agreed attainment covering a
range of outcomes to use as a reference for future assessments and moderations, and as evidence of the moderation
process. Finally, thank everyone for attending and let them know of the date and time of any future meetings.

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Moderation Meeting: Planning Sheet 1

Use this planning sheet to support you in the initial organisation of your meeting.

Moderation Meeting: Planning Sheet 1

Which subject/area of learning

is to be moderated?

What is the date and time of the

meeting?

Where will the meeting be held?

Who is attending?

What is the year group/key

stage coverage of the group?

Has the group moderated

together before?

How will the moderation groups

be organised?

Where will each group work?

Will there be a pre-moderation

task to complete?

What will attendees bring?

What resources will be

required?

What will the groups record

their moderations on? Who will
have a copy?

What is the date, time and

location of any future meeting?

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Moderation Meeting: Planning Sheet 2

Timings Meeting Notes

Welcome/Introduction
• What will you say?
• What will you share?

Instructions/Organisation
• Who is working together?
• Are they working with the same year
groups or are you mixing the year
groups?
• Where are they working?
• How much time do they have?
• What should they do?
• How many pupils can be moderated
today?
• Do they need to work in pairs/threes/
or more, within their group?
• What needs to be completed for
each pupil?
• What should happen with completed
moderation forms?

Moderation process
• Who is in the groups?
• Where are they working?
• How long do they have altogether?
• How long do they have per pupil?
• What will you do?

Closing
• Will you gather back together?
• What will you share?
• Will attendees give feedback?
• Will you collect anything in?
• Any final notes?

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