At Teacher Tapp, we believe in an education sector where decisions are informed by voices on the ground – and that includes Trusts. We recognise the varying survey needs of multi-academy trusts and schools, and we hope our flexible ways of working reflect our commitment to providing exceptional value across groups of schools.
If you would like to discuss surveying in your Trust and how we can support you, please book a meeting:
Find the approach that suits your Trust
Our service is flexible, recognising that different Trusts need the approach to surveying that best suits their situation. Some Trusts want a highly centralised approach, others a school-led, with many interested in the options in the middle:
We are happy to help you talk through the approach that suits you best for the moment, and discuss moving between approaches. This article on Trust surveying goes into more detail.
There is one pricing structure, so it is possible to combine approaches, and/or take different approaches for different types of stakeholders. Our Trust pricing is based on how many schools there are in the Trust, and their sizes: large (secondary / all-through) / medium (most primaries, middles and specials) / small (under 150 pupils). We do not price according to specific numbers of staff or pupils.
Whichever approach is best for your situation, we are confident that School Surveys can help you to gain deeper insights, inform strategic decisions, and ultimately enhance the educational experience and outcomes across your schools. We would love to partner with you and would be delighted to answer any further questions you may have.
Please get in touch and book a short online meeting with us at a time that suits you by clicking here
FAQs about Trust surveying
Who administers the surveys?
There are a range of approaches to surveying. In terms of distributing surveys, the Trust can choose to do this themselves (either centrally or via their schools) by sharing links and/or QR codes. Surveys operate with a link per school, rather than an individual link per person. This makes sharing surveys simple, and completely anonymous.
Some Trusts and schools like to use the School Surveys system for notifying staff or parents about surveys and sending notifications to aid response rates; email addresses are uploaded into our secure system to facilitate this. An invitation goes out by email when the survey opens, and again the day before it closes. This approach can be viewed as more ‘at a distance’ and aid the sense of surveys being anonymous.
Who decides on the questions that are asked in surveys?
The Trust or the individual schools have full control of the surveys that they set and the questions that they ask. They can use our questions and templates, and/or they can write their own questions if they wish to. We offer guidance and support in various ways:
- Question banks: 300+ Teacher Tapp expertly-written staff questions; the instructional coaching questions have been co-developed with Steplab. With expertly-written parent and pupil questions.
- Our templates: we have devised a series of template surveys that can provide a useful starting point for creating surveys.
- Case studies: our help centre and our blog give lots of ideas and suggestions for how to approach surveying, how to promote good response rates and how to share results effectively.
- Support calls: in addition to the onboarding training sessions, school and Trust leaders are welcome to book additional support sessions as required.
What sort of benchmarks do you provide?
Unrivalled staff benchmarking is based on the Teacher Tapp daily polling of 10,000+ teachers
- Typical benchmarks are set to work at phase and FSM quartile level. Other options may be provided on request. Benchmarks are available on nearly all staff questions; occasionally we make other questions available that we have not run through Teacher Tapp (e.g. DfE consultations), and these build up benchmarks based on being used by schools in the platform.
- Questions are re-asked on a cyclical basis in order to ensure that they remain up to date. New questions are added to the School Surveys question bank as the team deems useful, and members are encouraged to make requests or suggestions for the team to review.
Support staff, parent and pupil benchmarking is based on over three years of asking questions to these groups via the School Surveys platform. Please note that when new questions are added to School Surveys for these groups, benchmarks will only show once sufficient data has been collected through them being used. Data must hit thresholds for validity before being shown, e.g. sufficient data points and coming from a minimum number of separate institutions.
What data and reports does the service offer?
Whilst a survey is open, the incoming data can be seen live in the online results portal. Once a survey closes, a PDF summary of the report (including an Executive Summary) is emailed automatically to leaders in the portal. If it is a Trust survey, the Trust report goes to the Trust leaders, whilst individual school reports will automatically go to leaders in the individual schools (if they have joined their school portal – this is at the Trust’s discretion). Some Trust leaders choose to distribute school reports themselves. A CSV file is also created automatically for each survey, and the online reporting area allows leaders to do further analysis (for example, if they wish to change the ‘over time’ view of previous results, or apply different filters according to different questions that have been asked).
Here is a sample of a Trust report page, showing overall Trust performance, performance of individual schools, and comparisons with national benchmarks (the black horizontal lines):
‘Over time’ comparison bars can be added for any time when the question has been asked previously to show the distance travelled. These appear as striped bars, beside the existing bars, for at a glance comparisons.
Can School Surveys handle large amounts of data securely?
Yes, School Surveys has been operating since 2022 with over 400 schools and is increasingly working with a range of Trusts. We have been running Trust-wide surveys with Trusts of varying sizes since 2023, including Trusts of 40+ schools and Trusts running multiple trust-wide surveys throughout the year. This means we are regularly collecting, analysing and presenting large amounts of data.
More broadly, Teacher Tapp’s existence rests on the expertise and technology required to run a longitudinal survey across seven years, asking multiple questions to 10,000+ teachers every single day. This means we collect around a million linked data points a month. Our processes are robust enough that we are regularly commissioned by organisations such as the Office for National Statistics.
What sort of training and support do you offer?
We are flexible as to the requirements of different Trusts and the team is on hand to provide support as needed from 8am to 6pm Monday to Friday (with technical team back up outside of these hours). As a minimum, we expect to deliver the following sessions in order to help the Trust and schools use the service successfully:
- An onboarding session for central staff who will run any Trust surveys (30-60minutes)
- An onboarding session for individual school SLT members who will run surveys in their schools (typically 30 minutes) – if required
- A mid-contract check-in session to ensure the Trust is getting expected value from the contract
- A mid-year check-in session to hear how schools are getting on and facilitate sharing of ideas / giving support
Find out more
If you would like to discuss surveying in your Trust and how we can support you, please book a meeting:
You are also welcome to:
- Visit the blog to find guides, advice and case studies on all aspects of surveying
- Call on 0330 043 4469 from 8am to 6pm during the working week
- Email us via hello@schoolsurveys.com
