What’s the typical school leader dealing with each day? Our Teacher Tapp data would suggest that it’s a bewildering range of tasks, from the sublime (overseas residential anyone? 71% of you have!) to the ridiculous (an astonishing 45% of you are currently dealing with at least one leak in the building somewhere). There’s quite a mix of routine (58% of you are doing assembly more than twice a week) and hopefully not-so-routine (26% of you were faced with a toileting accident in school today).
From the early morning rush to sort staffing, right through to securing the site in the evening, school leaders deal with a complex array of tasks and challenges. Even in the rare moments when they get to their desk, it’s usually just moments before the phone rings or someone pops in. Dealing with the inbox often doesn’t happen until well after most people have gone home, and 18% of headteachers report a typical backlog of more than 100 unread emails. Time to work strategically can be in critically short supply.
At School Surveys we are very aware of these pressures and this is why we’ve gone another step with making surveying staff, parents and pupils even easier.
Our new template surveys
We’re delighted to launch our new template surveys, each with eight to twelve carefully chosen questions, ready to use as suits, or at certain suggested points during the school year. Each template can be used exactly as it is, or edited according to your needs.
When you go into the School Surveys portal to set up a survey, you are given the option to create a new survey from our question bank, or to use one of our templates. There is a short description of each template survey so you get a sense of its purpose and length, and you can see the questions it contains.
The idea behind these templates is to provide a useful starting point, and thereby save you time.
In using a template, you will know that we’ve carefully thought about that group of questions and the actionable insights that we think it will give you. Whether it’s reporting back to staff or governors, forming a working party to tackle an issue in depth, or making an immediate change, we try to keep focused on how each one of our surveys will help you make improvements in your school or trust.
Sometimes you’ll find that the template is exactly what you are looking for and you don’t need to make any adjustments. You simply set the survey open and close dates, and then you are ready to share! Each survey should take staff members around five to ten minutes to answer, and doesn’t require any special login or password.
What changes can I make to a template?
However, sometimes you may want to make some changes and we’ve designed the templates to be easy to edit:
- Removing questions: if there a question that you don’t want to ask, you can simply delete it with a click.
- Adding questions: once you’ve selected your template, you can also look through the question bank in the usual way to add any further questions that you wish to ask. There are around 300 expertly-written questions grouped in topic folders to help you find the ones that you want via browsing or searching.
- Adding your own questions (and response options): you can also write your own questions should you wish to. We recommend reserving this for bespoke issues as those questions will not generate benchmarked answers in your report. A good example might be, “Which of these colour combinations do you prefer for our new uniform?”. We have some great advice on writing questions in this blog post here.
- Other changes: you can also do the usual things like re-ordering the questions, adjusting the survey open and close dates, and deciding whether to share with a link or a QR code.
Further improvements
We will be tracking the use of the templates to see which ones are proving most popular. We also review the whole question bank to ensure that we have the questions that are most useful and relevant for you, in line with changing policies, priorities and concerns in schools. And we regularly look at the bespoke questions that you have created, to see if any of those would be useful for everyone to have access to.
If you think of any other ways that we can support you or save you time, please do get in touch. We love to hear from our schools and want to do everything we can to support the hard work that you are doing.
