Here at Teacher Tapp, we’re passionate about hearing from voices on the ground in education – and in the world of School Surveys, yes, this includes the parents!
We fully appreciate that working with parents is a complex area, and can include challenges. Our own Teacher Tapp insights on the matter are telling, with our data leading to several negative headlines in recent months about the decline in school-parent relationships. Take for example, evidence of how parental disputes drive pupil absence or how parents are weaponising technology against teachers.
Here’s the national teacher response to just one of our most recent questions about parents:
And parents can often have some pretty demanding expectations, particularly thought to have been impacted by the experience of the pandemic. Teacher perception is that these have increased:
More insights from Teacher Tapp on home school relationships can be found here.
Why listening to parents early makes a difference
But, challenging as home-school relationships can sometimes be, we know they are important.
Educational research consistently highlights that parental engagement is one of the strongest predictors of a child’s success at school. From John Hattie’s seminal 2008 study to the wide-ranging analysis of the EEF toolkit, parental engagement is shown to have a positive impact on pupil progress. The toolkit reports an average impact of four months of additional progress.
When parents trust the school and feel part of the journey, they are more likely to reinforce learning at home, communicate openly, and collaborate when challenges arise.
Leaning in – and seeing off trouble
Teacher Tapp co-founder Laura McInerney wrote last year about the science behind reaching out to invite parents to complain. The message is, counterintuitively perhaps, lean in and reach out early. You can read that blog post in full here.
With this in mind, how about running a survey aimed specifically at your newest parents? The start of a school journey is an exciting but often anxious time for families. Whether children are entering Reception, moving into Year 7, or joining mid-year, parents naturally wonder: Is my child happy? Are they making friends? Do teachers know them well?
The way the parents experience these early weeks sets the tone for the relationship they will have with the school for years to come. A strong start builds trust and a sense of partnership.
The Settling In Survey for new parents
A settling-in survey doesn’t need to be long. We’ve put together a handful of well-designed questions that can reveal a great deal about how children and parents are experiencing the transition. And we are offering for ALL schools to run this survey for FREE, via our secure School Surveys platform. It is available during the first half of the autumn term (until 31st October).
Schools that are not already on School Surveys can register here (sign up with a school email address, identifying the school with its URN or postcode).
Questions in the template cover:
- How their child has settled in
- Whether their child is feeling safe and making friends
- How parents feel about communication with the school
- Any concerns they would like to raise
Schools can use all the questions in the template, or remove some questions if they wish to. Adding further questions or writing bespoke ones is limited to schools that are full members of School Surveys.
Schools will get their survey report automatically generated when their survey closes. Benchmarks are already available on over half of the questions, and this proportion will continue to grow as more parents complete the surveys.
The act of asking is as powerful as the answers themselves. It signals that the school is proactive, caring, and committed to improvement.
Register to run the survey in your school
Further information about the Settling In Survey trial can be found here, including full terms and conditions and our privacy policy.
