Better Feedback for Students, More Breathing Room for Teachers: How Seton Catholic College transformed learning with Nurture

Peter teaches at Seton Catholic College in Samson, Western Australia, and by his own admission, he is one of those teachers who finds it almost impossible to switch off. Not because he lacks discipline, but because he cares. When a student needs help, he is available. When feedback is needed, he provides it. And in a school environment where students can reach their teacher at almost any hour, that availability has a cost.

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"You don't want to discourage students from asking for feedback," he says, "but it does drain a lot of your time being constantly accessible. We are our own worst enemy in that regard. We don't switch off even though we should."

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The problem is structural. Teachers who care naturally make themselves available, and students who need help naturally reach out. But without a formal, contained channel for that communication, it bleeds into every corner of a teacher's time. Evenings, weekends, the margins of every other task. The result is a teacher perpetually on call, and students who either receive informal ad hoc support or, in larger classes where they don't know their teacher as well, nothing at all.

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For students in bigger classes at Seton, the options were limited. Put your hand up in front of everyone, something many students find genuinely difficult, or stay silent with an unresolved question. For quieter students, or those in classes where they did not feel a strong connection with the teacher, silence was the easier choice.

When Seton began using Nurture, the change that landed most immediately wasn't about the feedback itself. It was about the channel.

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For Oliver, one of Peter's students, the value was immediately clear: "I think it provides more like structure. It's provided more opportunity for me to get, like, targeted, this is what you should be doing, rather than counting up for myself at some point and getting a bit lost in that."

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But beyond structure, what Nurture offered was something more personal: the ability to receive and respond to feedback in private. "It helps to have a private, official form of communication rather than just kind of hanging around after class," Oliver explains. "It's good to have a way to express what you're feeling in a private manner. It makes it feel easier."

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This matters more than it might initially seem. In a busy school, the informal alternatives to private feedback, like waiting around after class or hoping to catch a teacher in the corridor, require a kind of confidence and persistence that not every student has. For students who would not put their hand up in front of the class, or who felt awkward about approaching their teacher directly, there was previously no good option.

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Nurture created one. As Peter describes it, the platform became "a really good bridge between directly having put your hand up and the teacher addressing you, and not having nothing at all." For students who needed to ask but did not know how to ask, the structured, private feedback channel gave them a way in.

The transformation Peter has noticed is most visible in a place he never expected to see it: in the students who never used to say anything at all.

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"Students who don't engage with me at all are asking me about Nurture, asking me about the feedback that Nurture is giving them. And then we actually have a discussion about that." For a teacher who had tried and largely failed to draw certain students into active conversation about their learning, this was significant. The feedback had given them something concrete to talk about, a shared reference point for a conversation that might never have happened otherwise.

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The impact extends beyond the classroom to Peter's relationship with his own time. "It's allowed myself a bit of time to switch off, knowing that the student is still doing work and getting some feedback as well, which is productive." The always-on teacher has found, for perhaps the first time, a way to step back without stepping away.

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That psychological release has had practical consequences for how Peter teaches. "This has really helped me focus on the big things, our students using evidence, our students incorporating syllabus, and it's leaving the grunt work of idea formation to Nurture, which is great." The cognitive overhead of constantly providing first-pass feedback has been redistributed, and freeing it up has given Peter space to do the parts of teaching that only a human teacher can do.

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He describes the change in his students with a phrase that captures the significance of the shift: "When feedback lands, the foundations aren't made of sand anymore."