From ‘This Is a Lot’ to ‘I Love Feedback’: How St John’s Catholic School Roma transformed student learning with Nurture

In a busy secondary school classroom, there is a maths problem that never quite gets solved. A student writes an English essay, one of perhaps forty submitted that week. Their teacher wants to give specific, useful feedback. They care about the student's progress. But reading forty essays carefully and writing individual, substantive responses to each one does not fit inside a working week, no matter how well-intentioned the teacher.

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The result, familiar to students across the country, is feedback that defaults to brevity. "I feel like English should be especially helpful because we do a lot of paragraphs," one student at St John's Catholic School in Roma explains, "but we don't really get feedback on them because looking through 40 paragraphs takes forever."

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The problem compounded in larger classes. For students who already knew their teacher well, asking a question was easy enough. For others, in their words "a bit standoffish about asking questions," there was no comfortable way to seek help. The choice was to speak up publicly in front of peers, or say nothing at all.

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And when feedback did arrive, the quality varied. The best was specific and actionable. The rest was generic, the kind of response that feels encouraging in the moment but leaves no lasting impression on how a student writes. What students wanted was feedback that actually helped them improve. What they were getting, too rarely, was that.

When Nurture was introduced at St John's, students encountered something they hadn't quite expected: a lot of feedback. More than they were used to. More detailed, more specific, more direct.

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"The first time it was like, 'Oh, this is a lot of feedback,'" one student recalls. Students who had grown accustomed to brief comments or grades were suddenly receiving structured responses that identified what they had done well, where they needed to improve, and what that improvement could look like in practice. It took adjustment.

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But adjustment came quickly. "Once we got used to how much feedback there was and how to implement it, it got easier." The volume, which initially felt overwhelming, began to feel purposeful. The detail, which had seemed like too much, became navigable.

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What students found most useful was the specificity. "For me, it's the teacher being really descriptive on my work, teaching me what to fix in future work, or telling me what parts are good but also can be changed if need be." Feedback that told students not just what was wrong, but why it was wrong and what to do about it, was qualitatively different from what they had experienced before.

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One student described the shift with particular clarity: "If I have less feedback on it, I feel like I've done a better job at the assessment on my own. But with more descriptive feedback, there are way more improvements." The initial instinct to treat sparse feedback as a sign of quality was giving way to something more accurate: more feedback meant more room to grow.

The change that matters most at St John's may not be the feedback itself. It may be what the feedback made possible for students who previously had no way to ask for help.

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"That's my favourite part," says Jess, one of the students. "When I submit, I get to give a little emoji. I can send a message to Miss Rogers. So for more shy students that don't want to talk out in class, or even in person, it's like 'I need help for this.'" In a school where some classes are close-knit and others are large enough to feel anonymous, this matters. The students who find public questions difficult, who sit in a bigger class feeling reluctant to ask, now have a channel. "On the feedback, if there's anything I'm confused about or just questions, I just ask the teacher."

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The results in terms of learning outcomes have been direct. Students who engaged with their Nurture feedback and acted on it report tangible improvement. "I love feedback, because most times I get an A from my class because I've just had feedback." The mechanism is simple: feedback identifies the gap, students close it, the work improves. What changed is that the feedback now actually exists, specific enough to act on, available enough to reach every student, and structured enough to make the path forward clear.

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"Really informational feedback that actually helped me improve what I've already done in my assignment," one student says. Not a grade, not a generic comment. Feedback that moved the work forward.