It is a truth universally acknowledged that teaching is really hard to do well. Indeed, renowned education researcher Lee Shulman describes the complexity of the classroom as tantamount to a doctor working in a danger zone during a natural disaster. In the most challenging and compelling ways, then, teaching can be considered difficult.

We master this difficulty by gradually accruing a deep reservoir of experience that helps mediate the complexity of the classroom. Teaching remains hard, but we gradually map out an array of workable strategies. For many effective teachers, well-managed peer assessment is a part of that successful repertoire but, for some other terrific teachers, it seldom features.

So, what are we to make of the potential of peer assessment? Is it a promising strategy or one wrought with peril?

We can best answer these tricky questions with a judicious balance of shared experience and by consulting high-quality evidence.

In a recent Tes article, titled “The end of the peer?” (3 January issue), Jo Facer explored in depth the pitfalls and failures that attend peer assessment. Peer feedback is described as “very, very tough to get right”. Facer instead offers whole-class feedback as the superior strategy.

I can’t argue with the personal experience of Jo in the classroom. Not only that, I agree that peer feedback is tough to establish and needs a robust routine. And yet, in my own classroom experience, peer assessment became a valuable strategy.

Why the difference in opinion? Our classroom experiences are inevitably limited to our school and this can foster blindspots and biases in our judgments amid the complexity of the classroom. Happily, research evidence can offer us some insights away from the tumult of the busy classroom.

A recent large-scale meta-analysis of peer feedback prompts us to challenge the notion that we should chuck out peer assessment. Titled “The Impact of Peer Assessment on Academic Performance: a meta-analysis of control group studies”, this research, conducted by the University of Oxford, shows that, on average, peer feedback can have a beneficial impact on pupil outcomes.

The Oxford research recognises that peer feedback is part of a complex web of teacher, peer and self-assessment. Teachers invariably need training and sustained support to enact such peer feedback well. With support, it can become a help - and even save time on error-strewn marking of pupils’ work.

It cites research that there is a benefit to the “comparing and contrasting” with their peers’ more accessible examples. It recognises that the benefits are contingent on other factors, such as the complexity of the assessment itself. Support factors, such as scaffolding and the importance of friendship groups and rubrics, need exploring but the potential benefits can be worth it.

We should listen carefully to skilled teachers on the challenges of peer assessment, but nothing done well in the classroom is easy. Whole-class assessment, proposed as the superior solution by Facer, is similarly fraught with challenge and blindspots. By engaging with evidence, and supported by school leaders and school systems, the promises of peer assessment can be in our grasp and prove beneficial for our pupils.

Alex Quigley is national content manager for the Education Endowment Foundation, a former teacher and the author of the upcoming book Closing the Reading Gap

This article originally appeared in the 21 February 2020 issue under the headline “Three cheers for peer assessment”