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FAQs

How School Surveys works

Choose your questions

We provide access to our unique question bank – you create a survey tailored to your needs, using our easy survey builder

Ask your staff anonymously

Staff receive a link at the time you’ve chosen and complete the survey in less than five minutes

Gain unique insights

We create a report showing exactly what’s going on, and how it compares to other schools

How can we help?

Topics

School Surveys
Who are School Surveys?

School Surveys powered by Teacher Tapp provides tailored surveys built for your school or organisation. Teacher Tapp is a free application designed for teachers to answer three quick questions about school life on a daily basis. For more information on Teacher Tapp, please click here

We want to support school leaders to make a difference in education in an uncomplicated way. We provide complex data received from staff, pupil and parent surveys in a usable way.

What topics do you have?

We have many different topics to choose from with over 300 staff questions and 100+ pupil and parent survey questions. 

For staff surveys, we offer 23 different topics! These cover a range of areas such as:

  • Behaviour
  • Curriculum
  • SEND
  • Pastoral
  • Wellbeing

For parent and pupil surveys, our topics include:

  • Learning
  • Parenting
  • Communication
  • Personal development 

And more.

Here are some examples of the questions we provide: 

  • What should leaders do to improve wellbeing in school? (Staff)
  • Which of the following words would you use to describe your school’s behaviour policy? (Staff)
  • Which of these words describes how you felt about your last lesson? (Students)
  • How doable are homework tasks for your child? (Parents)

Please get in touch with us at hello@schoolsurveys.com to discuss your school or trust/organisation’s needs and explore the full catalogue of topics we have available.

What kind of questions do you have?

Our bank of questions are carefully designed to allow you to get the most out of School Surveys. Across the 23 different topics available in staff surveys, we have questions which fall into various categories.

– Purely subjective: how do they feel or what are their opinions about the chosen topic. These could look like open ended questions or ask opinions about whether a policy is clear, vague, reasonable, and so on.

– More objective about staff behaviour – these questions lean more towards frequency of tasks or events in school. These usually include numerical answers. When asking how many days in the week staff have stayed after school for example, they give a numerical answer up to 5.

– Questions about what is going on around them – these questions give leaders a valuable insight into aspects of the school which they may not always see first hand. An example question is whether staff members are doing their allocated duties which can have responses such as always, sometimes and so on.

– What are the effects they can see – for example, when asking which behaviours your staff have seen around the school in the last week, have they seen students fighting, using mobile phones, dropping litter and so on.

– What can leadership do differently – these questions are usually open ended, and ask respondents for their opinions on the chosen topic. Respondents type what they would like to share with leadership and you will see their responses as they have been typed.

Why should I choose School Surveys and not a free survey provider?

School Surveys differs from free survey providers in that we provide representative, benchmarked data we receive from over 10,000 staff using Teacher Tapp. This gives leaders a reference point when looking at the data, as they can see whether the results from their school are positive or not.

We also have years of experience in designing and perfecting our questions. It can be hard to find good questions to ask whereas we are really good at it! 

In addition to this, we have designed the platform to be quick and easy to use as setting up your own survey can be time consuming. We make this fast. It takes approximately three minutes to create a survey and you will also have dedicated, ongoing support from the School Surveys team. Reports are also automatically generated, and you will receive it within one hour of the survey closing.

How do you get the benchmarked data?

When your survey has closed, you will receive a report which benchmarks your school against schools like yours. Teacher responses are benchmarked against schools which are in the same phase as you, and have a similar amount of pupils receiving free school meals. We get this data from the responses of over 10,000 teachers who answer daily on Teacher Tapp. 

Pupil and parent surveys are benchmarked against other schools who are using School Surveys.

Who can I survey?

When you sign up for School Surveys, you can survey parents, pupils and staff.

Can I use School Surveys to survey governors?

At the moment, School Surveys can be used to survey staff, students and parents. Let us know at hello@schoolsurveys.com if this is something you would like to see!

Are the surveys suitable for support staff?

Most staff survey questions are suitable for support staff and if applicable, we will split the data from a survey into support staff answers and teachers’ answers. There are a small proportion of survey questions which are aimed at teachers but there is the option to answer ‘not applicable’.

Can I use School Surveys in my trust/organisation?

Yes. We work with a growing number of trusts and local authorities. If you would like more information about how School Surveys can support your trust, please get in touch with us at hello@schoolsurveys.com.

Can I set my own questions?

Yes! We have years of experience at curating the best questions to ask so we recommend you take a look at our question banks first to see if what you want to ask already exists. This would also mean, for our closed response questions, you would be able to see your benchmarks. 

If there is something specific to your organisation which isn’t included, you can now add:

  • Open response questions – these are questions where your participants can type their answers to the question.
  • Multiple choice questions – these are questions where your participants can select multiple answers from a pre-defined list.
  • Single response questions – these are questions where your participants can choose just one response from a pre-defined list. 
When do I get the reports?

Reports for individual schools are generated automatically when the survey closes. All leaders will receive the report to their email address within an hour after the closing time (usually sooner). Trust / organisation reports can take up to 24 hours due to the increased complexity of the reports. 

How much does it cost?

The cost of the School Surveys package depends on whether you sign up to our unlimited or our staff surveys package. 

Please feel free to book a meeting by clicking here or send us an email at hello@schoolsurveys.com to discuss further.

How often should I create surveys?

It’s totally up to you. We usually recommend that surveys should be sent out every half term. This allows you to receive regular feedback from staff, students and parents. It also allows you to strengthen lines of communication between leaders and all other members of the school community. 

When surveys are set regularly, we are also able to provide a comparison in your report by showing the answers to the same questions. This allows you to track the impact of the changes you are making.

How do other schools use School Surveys?

We have designed School Surveys to offer a high degree of flexibility. You set up the surveys to run at a convenient time and you can focus on the topics which are most important to you. 

We think schools get the most out of school surveys when they plan their surveys in advance to cover important issues for them, and then track the impact of the changes they are making. The surveys allow schools to communicate effectively and respond to any issues raised in the surveys. 

For more information about how other schools are using School Surveys, you can read case studies about MEA Central and Durham Johnston Comprehensive School.

Won’t this increase our workload?

We don’t think so! The ethos behind School Surveys is to actually improve staff workload. Through the effective use of School Surveys, improvements to staff workload can be made. 

The surveys take, on average,  just three minutes to create and take around the same amount of time to complete. We wanted to make School Surveys as easy as possible to use. We have a bank of questions available so you don’t have to spend time writing questions and our portal is designed to be easy to use.

We ask a mandatory question about staff happiness at the beginning of every survey, which is then used to track and monitor the overall feelings of staff over time. We then have a number of topics related to workload and wellbeing, which can be asked to staff regularly. 

Some of these questions focus on how staff feel towards their jobs at the moment, but there are also questions which investigate the ‘why’ they feel like this and what staff think could be done to improve the situation. These answers can provide actionable insights into how the school or organisation can actually improve staff workload. 

Examples of questions that help leaders to do this, include:

  • How many days this week have you had an after-school meeting or activity?
  • Approximately how many emails have you received in the last working day?
  • How much time did you spend marking student work over the past week?

Click here to read an article by Sam Crome where he explains how his school uses School Surveys to improve staff wellbeing. 

How do I make suggestions?

If you have any suggestions, feature ideas or any feedback, please feel free to get in touch with us! You can simply drop us an email at hello@schoolsurveys.com

How do I switch between schools as a trust?

If you are a trust leader, you can see both the trust and the individual school portals. To switch between them, simply:

  1. Click the name of your trust in the top left hand corner on the page.
  2. Click Settings
  3. Click All schools

You will then see all the schools in your trust. You can click on the name of an individual school to access their portal.