I was 13 when a girl named Lucy taught me how to dye my hair. In the process, we also dyed the floor of her parents’ bathroom, but they were very good natured about it.

When I was 15, a boy named Alec taught me what MSN Messenger was and how to use it, which immediately depleted the amount of free time that I found I had available to do homework in the evenings.

And just a few years ago, I moved in with my closest friend Sarah and, in the space of a few weeks, I managed to learn how to froth milk, how to paint my nails, that you cannot wear black with yellow (“You look like a bumblebee”), that you can open and load a dishwasher mid-cycle (by her opening the dishwasher mid-cycle and my screaming, “Don’t, you’ll flood the house!” - she did not) and that tuna fish are actually quite big (despite the tiny tins - oh, the misconceptions we grow up with).

Some things are better taught to you by friends. Usually, they are things that only friends can teach you. And they are things that should be taught to you by friends.

But should friends be teaching things that teachers usually teach us, too?

I cannot think of a single instance when a friend helped me to progress as a learner. In maths, when I was horrifyingly far behind my peers, a nearby classmate would valiantly try to reteach in a whisper what had gone over my head in the teacher’s instruction - but to no avail. In other subjects, friends were a distraction, not a learning device: any interaction with them hindered rather than helped my progression.

As a teacher, I found the same: pupils just did not have the knowledge or expertise to be helpful to each other.

So why, I ask myself, is peer assessment so rife in schools? Am I missing something?

I used to be a fan. My peer assessment awakening came during my first year of teaching. I had struggled that year, as so many trainees do. I’d been told in training that, while I might be a terrible teacher, the one thing I could do effectively was to mark books. And so I marked. And marked. And marked. I marked every child’s book every week; double the school’s expectation of teachers at that time.

By the summer term I was at breaking point and then, in a moment that felt like being given an impromptu free period on a Friday afternoon, the concept of “peer assessment” was introduced to me in a teacher-training session. “Why don’t you use peer assessment?” said the jolly girl, who clearly had no idea that she was communicating world-changing information. “You just get them to swap books and mark each other’s.”

Of course, I now know that this is emphatically not how to peer-assess, but a group of trainee teachers can sometimes become the blind leading the blind.

“OK, Year 8,” I announced the next day, “here’s what we’re going to do. Swap your book with the person next to you. Take out a coloured pen. Mark their work.”

I provided no further instructions, and they didn’t appear to need any. The class were more than usually quiet, intent as they were at placing neat coloured ticks and smiley faces on each other’s work. No one wrote any comments. What would they write? I had given them no guidance.

After that, I got better at peer assessment. I read about it, and I liked what I saw. What was not to like about children taking control of their own learning, learning from each other and devolving responsibility away from the teacher?

By the book

So I started to be more specific, asking children to write a “What Went Well” and “Even Better If” by their partner’s work.

Unfortunately, my Years 7-11 classes, more often than not, wrote that their partner had “worked hard”, “written lots” or “made it really interesting for me to read”. Great for wellbeing, but pretty disastrous as constructive learning advice.

By my second year of teaching, I was creating a list of “success criteria” for tasks, then asking students to tick the ones that their partner had used and provide feedback on the ones they hadn’t. What could possibly go wrong?

Absolutely everything. They weren’t very good at identifying where their partner had hit the success criteria, and they were even worse at talking about where they could improve. This problem was exacerbated by mixed-attainment classes, with a high-attainment student unaware of how to break things down for their lower-attaining partner, and the lower-attaining partner flummoxed by their partner’s words. They may as well have been speaking different languages.

If that wasn’t enough, I had children purposefully writing scrappily in a book-proud classmate’s book, scribbling or doodling on a pristine page; and once, in a challenging group, tearing the page out “by accident,” to the horror of its owner.

I had to give up. What else could I do? I had given peer assessment the best possible chance, and it had failed - spectacularly.

It makes sense that peer assessment fails. There is, of course, value in children reading one another’s work. After all, how can you know what the standard is if you’ve never seen it? Using children’s work as a model is hugely powerful: it builds pride in the child whose work you have chosen, and signals to the class that the heights of subject success are in that very room.

And yet I’m still not sure that you could get the child themselves to explain what they had done well, even though they had written it - often, they’re not sure. They can’t break it down. And getting a child to go through that process with work that is not their own is even harder.

It’s all hard, in fact, because - forgive me for stating the obvious - they’re not teachers.

Daisy Christodoulou, in Seven Myths About Education, reminds us that “we often underestimate our knowledge and overestimate students’ knowledge”.

This point was made particularly clear to me when trying to get children to do the job of a teacher. The intricacies of our subjects, and what it means to succeed in them, are not even always clear to trained professionals. There are numerous disputes during moderation meetings, for example - even those composed of trained and experienced professionals - over what particular grade a particular piece ought to be awarded.

Now, if you look at the research, it will tell a relatively positive story about peer assessment overall. You will find reports of gains in achievement when it is conducted in numerous different ways. But dig deeper, and you begin to see what may be the issue.

Peer assessment can, indeed, be beneficial, but only in certain conditions. It needs to be carefully designed; teachers and students both need to be trained to do it well; and it needs to be used for the right tasks at the right time. And it takes some time to get it right, even when all this is in place.

As David Simcock, research manager at the National Foundation for Educational Research, wrote in a blog for the organisation: “Self- and peer assessment are inherently challenging. There’s a reason why traditional teaching leaves assessment to the adults. Teachers have the subject knowledge and metacognitive skills to recognise faulty thinking and send learners in the right direction. Children find this much harder - that’s why they need teaching in the first place.”

He does say that it’s worth persevering with peer assessment regardless, but I am not so sure. The reason we do so much peer assessment in schools is not because we have all submerged ourselves in the research and so we will be sure to get it right; rather, it’s because of these three things:

1. We want to believe that children can self-regulate in their subject performance. We want to believe that they can spot what is good and improve what is not. But to believe this would be to underplay our role and expertise as a teacher: we are trained to support children to succeed - they are not. Unless we are going to train them (good luck finding time for that), we should not do them the disservice of expecting them to do something that they can’t do.
2. We want to remove ourselves from the teaching process: we want children to become independent, motivated learners. But encouraging and building independence does not just mean forcing children to be independent without support. We don’t drop members of the public into Year 9 PE and say, “Have a go at that, and then an independent teacher you shall be.” We spend years nurturing teachers to be truly confident alone in a classroom, and even then most of us still have to call in reinforcements occasionally.
3. We want to devolve the burdensome responsibility of marking away from us and towards someone - anyone - else, and we have before us a classroom full of willing markers. But this is to misunderstand the purpose of marking and feedback, and the best way to provide feedback - which I would argue is actually not by marking but by providing regular and thoughtful whole-class reteaching of concepts that pupils have not yet mastered.

In short, we’re not doing peer assessment for the right reasons - and even if we were, it would still be very, very tough to get it right.

So, is there really no place for peer assessment in the classroom? Come now, I am not an ogre: I would say it very much depends on who is in that classroom, and what classroom it is.

If you’re marking a spelling test, or a maths test, it makes sense to ask children to mark their partner’s work: the teacher is providing the answers, and you’re not tempted to cheat and change your own. The answer is either right or not right, and if you have clear behaviour management protocols, no one should end up tearing up anyone else’s book.

Beyond that? Honestly, do yourself - and your pupils - a favour and use whole-class feedback instead.

When children complete an extended piece of complex work, take it in. Have a read. Have some paper beside you. Note down the common mistakes, errors and misconceptions. You will probably find that 80 per cent of these are common across the class. Reteach and address those errors to the whole class. Then, for the 20 per cent who make unusual errors, note their names down as a reminder to catch up with them one-to-one the next lesson.

That’s it. It’s that simple. Students do need a friend, but the truth is: they’ve got a (best) friend in you.

Jo Facer is principal designate of Ark Soane Academy, a new school opening in Acton Town, West London, in September 2020. She writes regularly at readingallthebooks.com, and her book Simplicity Rules is published by Routledge. She tweets @jo_facer

This article originally appeared in the 3 January 2020 issue under the headline “The end of the peer”