Saffira is waiting nervously for her teacher to hand back the test on chemical reactions taken the week before. She had revised hard, read through the work on the topic, quizzed herself, copied out key sections and built a beautiful mind map. But Saffira still found the test difficult.

The teacher finally places the test paper on her desk. The result is scrawled in blue biro on the front: 20/50.

She normally achieves more than 30 on these tests. A surge of emotion - sadness, fear, embarrassment - takes her breath away and brings heat to her cheeks. She looks at her teacher.

“This was a little disappointing, Saffira,” he says sympathetically. “Did you try your best to revise?”

Saffira nods, but says nothing.

“Well, in that case,” he adds, smiling and tilting his head slightly, “if you couldn’t have tried any harder, don’t worry, you did your best.”

He moves on to Lena, seated in front.

“Lena, brilliant as always: 47/50,” he exclaims. “You really are a natural at science!”

Saffira looks on. Her motivation hits rock bottom.

Could her teacher have handled this process differently? His comments to Saffira were clearly designed to offer comfort. And telling someone that it’s OK if they have done their best is pretty standard in schools.

But I have a problem with “comfort feedback”. It’s rife in education. It feels, intuitively, to be the ethical thing to do. It feels like you are being kind and fair to the student - after all, if they have done their best, what more can they do? And it feels like it’s the only way to keep their motivation up.

These assumptions, though, are wrong. What students like Saffira really need to hear - actually, what every student needs to hear - is how to make their best better.

The language that we use when offering feedback to students has always been crucial, but right now it may matter more than ever before.

The disruption and time out of school caused by the coronavirus pandemic will have exposed existing vulnerabilities in learning, as well as created new ones. Doubts will have festered and motivation left to wane. Small problems will have grown into more substantial challenges. After weeks of learning remotely, or not, confidence may have taken a significant hit. There may be a fragility to our students that we should not underestimate.

At the same time, the urgency of the job of resolving the learning deficits that will have emerged require our attention. The Education Endowment Foundation (EEF) has suggested that the past decade’s worth of progress in closing the attainment gap is likely to have been reversed. But for every child, our input is going to be crucial if we are to avoid a long-term negative impact from the past six months’ events.

This balancing act between reassurance and academic progression is complex. Key to our success in achieving it will be the language we use around success, effort and, maybe more importantly, disappointment.

Our words matter: the EEF states that “feedback studies tend to show very high effects on learning”, but adds that this is not guaranteed: “[Feedback] also has a very high range of effects and some studies show that feedback can have negative effects and make things worse.”

It’s also repeatedly been found that students have a high level of trust in their teacher’s judgements; in general, if we say something about a child’s learning, they tend to believe that it’s true.

In this instance, I am specifically interested not in the formal feedback we may write in books or provide to a whole class. Instead, I want to look at those moments experienced by Saffira above: our comments when we hand back a test; the language we use when commenting on a piece of work as we move through the classroom; the words we choose when having a conversation with a student.

Often, these are the utterances that we don’t plan - it’s the ad hoc, from-the-hip feedback that comes instinctively. I would argue it is the type of feedback that can often do the most good or damage. Because more often than not, this is when I see teachers resorting to comfort feedback - the phrases of sympathy that are designed to keep a pupil’s spirits up and dampen disappointment.

Examples include: “Well done for doing your best”; “It was really bad luck, the test was very hard”; and, “Don’t worry, we all have down days.” But there are many more of a similar style.

Wrapped into comfort feedback are some very powerful assumptions. What do I mean by that? To tease this out and check whether my anecdotal evidence was an accurate reflection of reality, I ran a survey. Across several social media platforms, I posted a series of questions in teacher-only groups. More than 2,000 teachers responded.

Here’s what I learned.

1. Focus feedback on the ‘next’

Let’s take question 1 from the survey first: “How likely are you to say to a pupil who gets a lower-than-usual assessment score, ‘It’s OK as long as you did your best’?” Think back to Saffira’s teacher and the comfort feedback he uses to soften her disappointment. It’s well-meaning - he wants to guard against her losing motivation and thinking that her best is not good enough.

But is his approach successful in achieving those aims? Certainly many teachers do the same. The survey suggests that comfort-focused language is still hugely prevalent in schools. Moreover, it is more prevalent for those working at a lower level of prior attainment compared with higher prior levels of attainment, and highest of all for children with SEND.

That is not good news.

Academics have looked into comfort feedback and found that all is not as it seems. Rattan et al (2012) conducted a study into the effect of teacher mindset on pupils and discovered that teachers with fixed mindsets (ie, a belief that ability is generally fixed) are more likely to use comfort-focused language, such as “don’t worry, you’ll do better next time” or “this was a hard test!”

But they found that rather than comforting pupils, they actually became disheartened - this language lowered motivation and led to them predicting that they would not improve in future. Comfort feedback was not comforting. And it led to worse outcomes.

Rattan et al found that “strategy-focused” feedback was actually much more effective. That does not mean that this ad-hoc, immediate feedback suddenly becomes a full analysis of the work. Rather, it’s about choosing to be more strategic with the feedback in those moments: what can the student do next? The study found that this type of language was more often used by teachers with growth mindsets (a belief that ability is flexible), and that it was predictive of increased scores in future assessments.

If we apply strategy feedback to Saffira’s situation, the teacher can still use warmth and care, but also combine this with strategy-focused language. So he might say: “This is a little below what I think you are capable of. Have you tried using flashcards to test yourself on the different types of chemical reaction?” Saffira then knows the teacher believes that she could have done better, and he has given her a concrete piece of advice to achieve it.

So we need to be extremely cautious about comfort language and be conscious of the inequity involved with using it while addressing lower-prior-attainment students. As we “catch up” in the autumn term and beyond, our language risks undermining our efforts every step of the way, and most of all with children who are in greatest need of help.

2. Dispel the ‘gifted’ bias

What stops teachers giving that strategy-focused feedback? Rattan gives us a big hint to one major reason: it’s about mindsets. And that takes us to question 2: “How far do you agree that pupils can have natural gifts/talents for certain subjects?”

Learning about mindsets is now a pretty standard part of initial teacher education and more-experienced educators will undoubtedly have had CPD on the subject. We know about growth mindset and some of the key ideas that are pertinent to learning: the belief that we can improve our intelligence, for example.

But despite us having this knowledge and the ability to easily pass a mindset assessment, our subconscious behaviours, often through language choice, lay bare the truth of our beliefs.

Whether we like to admit it or not, we still hear about children being gifted or talented in certain subjects or sports. My survey shows it is actually much more prevalent than I had expected. The vast majority (87 per cent) of teachers believe some pupils have an innate ability that sets them apart. These labels - whether written on a list of “gifted” students or anecdotally acknowledged - matter.

Teachers of these pupils will have higher expectations of them, just because of that label. That knowledge is likely to have subconsciously changed the behaviour of teachers towards pupils and the language they use with them. And it has a knock-on impact for those not on the list - there’s a ripple effect of depleting expectations as you go down the prior-attainment levels (as we saw with question 1).

For Saffira, that sub-par performance is close enough to normal that, if she tried her best, well, that is fine. For Lena, the “natural scientist”, too, her effort was in line with expectations, so that’s fine too.

But it’s not fine.

Effective study strategies and good teaching should enable almost every student to achieve a good standard of attainment, given enough time. A study titled Innate talents: reality or myth? by Howe, Davidson and Sloboda (1998) concludes that “an analysis of positive and negative evidence and arguments suggests that differences in early experiences, preferences, opportunities, habits, training, and practice are the real determinants of excellence.”

Lena may have a superior working memory to Saffira, and be employing more effective strategies, hence her top scores. But given the right support - and time - Saffira could, in theory, match her.

There’s a plethora of work in this area. The research of Anders Ericsson has shown the importance of practice in creating expertise. Meanwhile, in his book Range, David Epstein details how “sampling” - working in a range of domains - can create expertise (see box, below). While they may be coming at it from different angles, both seem to agree that any traits that may be seen as “natural” talent are not enough alone to reach expertise.

Even geneticists such as Professor Robert Plomin talk about genes as being predictive: they are what could be, not what should be.

In short, any child in any given domain, given the right conditions, can succeed.

3. Talk about positive strategies

You don’t only hear comfort feedback in comments like “as long as you tried your best”, either. As question 3 - “How likely are you to say to a pupil that they were unlucky after a poor assessment score?” - discovered, you also see it in how teachers react to student performance and their comments thereafter. The idea of “luck” comes into play a lot in education and it seems we are willing to put the poor performance of a high-attaining student down to bad luck much more than we would those attaining at lower levels - we are giving high attainers more of the benefit of the doubt than those who are struggling.

The danger of all this is more acute because we don’t seem to have acknowledged the problem. In question 4, 97 per cent of respondents reported that it would be highly likely or likely for colleagues to say they had high expectations of students. Yet you see the answers to the previous three questions and it is clear that is not entirely the case.

None of this is an admonishment of teachers. It’s about acknowledging that we may be driven by subconscious assumptions, and that we need to force a change.

Now more than ever, we need to ensure that we notice what we say in those ad-hoc moments of feedback. We should recognise comfort feedback and strategy feedback, and be aware of the difference for the child in hearing one or the other.

Essentially, if we are to provide pupils with an equitable experience of expectations that build their resilience and self-belief, we need to pay close attention to what we say to them. Move away from using language focused on comfort and instead move towards descriptions of specific strategies that aid improvement. Do all of this with warmth and care, and we can make their “best” better.

Ian Taylor is lead teacher at Trinity Academy Sowerby Bridge in West Yorkshire

This article originally appeared in the 9 October 2020 issue under the headline “The flipside of comfort feedback”